


Trickster Makes This World

by marourin, TheNinthBow



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Cannibalism, Horror, M/M, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-15
Updated: 2014-11-15
Packaged: 2018-02-25 10:11:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 35,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2618066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marourin/pseuds/marourin, https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheNinthBow/pseuds/TheNinthBow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A mysterious phone call from Miles sends Arthur on the road to investigate why the members of the Fischer team are succumbing one by one to their nightmares. He must solve the puzzle before his own nightmare becomes reality.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the book Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art by Lewis Hyde. If you're interested in trickster mythology, I highly recommend it. 
> 
> This was written for Inception Reverse Bang and inspired by Marourin's amazing art, and the wonderful ideas that went along with it. 
> 
> A huge thank you goes to Mattheal for her beta skills. Any remaining mistakes are mine and mine alone.

Six months after the Fischer job, Arthur’s working a job in Houston when he gets a call from Paris. It’s an unlisted number, so caller ID isn’t a help with finding out who the caller is, and Arthur doesn’t recognize the number. It can’t be Cobb—he’s based outside of LA and living the civilian life now. Arthur hasn’t heard from him since they touched base in LAX after the Fischer job. The only other person he keeps in regular contact with that could be calling from Paris is Eames—he’s talked of a flat in Paris once or twice. But Eames is working this current job with him. Has, in fact, been working more jobs than not with him lately, and sharing his bed beside. The call is not from him.

So Arthur ignores the call the first two times the number comes through. After that, Arthur becomes curious. Fifth time’s a charm, and he answers with, “Moss Industries.”

“Arthur.”

Arthur, heading back to his and Eames’s hotel room with breakfast, comes to a stop with his keys halfway to the door’s locks.

“Miles?”

“I’m glad I finally reached you.”

“I’m surprised you could reach me at all.” Arthur shakes his head and finishes unlocking the door, steps into the room. Eames is up by now, still dressed in a pair of sweats, his shirt half buttoned. But he’s on the phone with what appears to be a lead for the job. Arthur’s about to step back into the hall to give Eames some privacy and silence to work in, but Eames waves a hand, beckoning him in. He stands and shuffles to the bathroom, one hand in his pocket, leaving Arthur alone in the main room.

“How’d you get this number?” Arthur asks. Miles used to be a kind of pseudo-friend. Arthur likes to think that if they’d found each other outside of dreamshare they’d have been congenial coworkers. Dedicated to the job, but friends of a sort. But dreamshare, when one party was forced into it and the other was a member of the organization that forced him into it, destroyed that. It’s been years since they last talked, even longer than that since they’ve worked with each other. “I didn’t realize it was traceable.”

“After Dom started recruiting my students to craft into architects for his dreams, I thought it wise to start expanding my own contacts in dreamshare. Just in case the occasion called for it.”

That sets off an uncomfortable feeling of misgiving pulsing at the base of Arthur’s ribs.

“And the occasion calls for it now?”

“I would say so. Yes.”

Arthur heads toward the room’s single desk and puts breakfast down on it before collapsing into the chair. Eames has left notes of the job scattered across the table, and Arthur looks them over as he’s talking.

“What is the occasion, then,” he asks.

“Dom's gone MIA." 

Nothing about that shocks Arthur. He starts organizing the papers back into some sort of order. “That’s not particularly unusual for him.”

“If you think cutting off all contact after daily calls from the children unusual, yes.”

“James and Phillipa?”

“Yes. I may have come back to France after making sure Dom and the kids were set up and safe after he returned to them, but since James spent most of his conscious life with his grandmother, it was hard for him—and Phillipa—to suddenly go back to life with just Dom.”

“Understandable.”

“So you see.”

“What you expect me to do about it?”

“Arthur, please.”

Arthur pauses. He didn’t work with Miles for long. But when he did, he couldn’t help but respect the man. For both his intellect and the prudence to get out of dreamshare while he could.

“I’m on a job.”

“I understand. But I can’t get on a plane until Thursday, and you’re only a few states over.”

Uneasiness settles in Arthur’s chest. “Your contacts told you where I was?” He does his best to keep his tracks hidden. Undetectable. Miles finding out where he is, let alone his number, is extremely unsettling.

“I have very good connections.”

“Then they probably told you that the client I’m working for is a hardball. People who quit on him have been known to turn up compromised in some way. Or not turn up at all.”

“My contacts can take care of that.”

That doesn’t make Arthur feel any better. But he looks over the notes Eames left out. This job is subpar, easy. If it hadn’t been for the client’s unpredictable behavior, and unnecessary attention to inconsequential details, the job would’ve been completed by now. As it stands, Arthur’s tired of it. If it weren’t for the client’s reputation, he’d break from it on principle alone. Miles’s proposal seems a good opportunity to do so. He looks up. Eames left the bathroom door open a crack, and he can see him moving slightly in the small space.

“Fine. But I can handle Adams myself.”

“Wouldn’t want to put you out. If you need it, I’ll have you covered.”

“Not necessary. But really, I’m curious. Why do you need me? I can go to Cobb’s house, stake it out, report back to you. But it seems like a waste of my skills.”

“Dom always trusted you.”

“Can’t say the same in return.”

“Not a lot of people can. But please. I just want to make sure James and Phillipa are okay. And I’ll be out there later in the week when I can. Just until then…”

Arthur sighs. “Fine. I’ll call you in three days.”

He hangs up before Miles can respond. He only has to wait a few minutes for Eames to return, phone off in his hand.

“Making any progress?” Arthur asks him.

Eames sighs. “We made progress weeks ago. Now we’re waiting for information our client thinks is coming but never will.”

Arthur pauses. “What do you think the likelihood is of Adams coming after us if we bailed?”

Eames looks up at him, but doesn’t say a word.

“It feels like he’s toying with us. I don’t like it. We’ve been ready to go under for days now and we’ve had ample opportunity. But Adams won’t allow it? That doesn’t seem fishy to you?”

“It reeks.”

“Yeah.” He pauses, looks Eames over.

He’s been working with Eames almost constantly for the past few months. After the Fischer job, Eames had contacted him with a tricky extraction. They’d worked it with one other team member and succeeded wonderfully. It reminded Arthur of the time before he worked so closely with Cobb. He’d worked most often and most closely with Eames back then. He’d started, in fact, his romp into dreamshare with Eames by his side in Project Somnacin. Before Mal’s death, they’d worked incredibly well together. It was only after her death, after Arthur followed Cobb to help him, that Eames broke contact.

The Fischer job and subsequent extraction afterward seemed to have reminded Eames that they worked well together too, that they did have a history, and a good one at that, because he kept contacting Arthur with jobs after. And Arthur returned the favor. And somehow, in between jobs, they fell into bed together. It’s nothing defined, nothing concrete, but for now it works. And works incredibly well; Arthur’s never had a run of jobs that went so smoothly, even though they’ve been some of the most complicated ones he’s worked. Plus, Arthur’s come to realize he prefers having Eames around. They have a good thing now, whatever it is that’s between them. He’s never given a thought to if or when what they have going on might end, but he wonders now if Miles calling might alter it.

“That was Miles,” he says.

Eames frowns. “Miles Cobb?”

Arthur nods. “Yeah. He wants someone to check in with Cobb. Apparently something’s going on. He needs help.”

“So you're ditching me for Cobb again?” His tone is light, teasing, but it makes Arthur tense. Eames grabs the coffee Arthur brought him, but doesn’t look up, doesn’t make eye contact.

“I never ditched anyone. But no. We’ll come back to the job if we have to. But really? It’ll give Adams time to come back to his senses. Give him time to realize the extraction’s now or never. If we don’t feel like ditching him for good." 

“No. Ditch it. Just got off the phone with Rodriquez. He said his last job didn’t go well with Adams.”

“I told you that from the start.”

“I know. But… I thought we might be able to do a better job. Now I realize it’s just Adams.”

Arthur nods. “So…”

“Grab your things. I’ll share a ride to the airport if that’s where you’re heading.”

Arthur’s stomach drops. But he tries to shake it off.

“I’m driving to California, better way to shake a tail. But I’ll drop you.” He pauses. “Got another job lined up already? Thought you might want to join me on this merry goose chase.”

Eames shakes his head, but he smiles. “That’s your job, Arthur,” he says. But he sounds almost amused. Or fond. It relaxes Arthur a little. “Yusuf’s been hounding me about helping him with some new compound. Lucid dreaming or something rather. You and I have been on a good run, so I haven’t made it out there. This’ll give me the opportunity to go, make sure Yusuf’s satisfied before we hear about another job.”

Arthur nods, feels some tension slide out of his muscles. “Alright.”  

Eames grins. Must see something in Arthur’s face, the way his shoulders suddenly relax, because as he leans over to grab a bagel off the desk beside Arthur. He leans in close, steps into Arthur’s space, and Arthur holds back a smile. “I’m a phone call away if you get bored or need me to chase down Cobb for you.”

Arthur shakes his head. “You’d love that.”

“Wouldn’t I just. But in the meantime, should I say my farewell now, rather than in the airport terminal?”

Arthur lifts an eyebrow, tries to remain stoic, impassive, but Eames’s hand settling warm and heavy on his thigh is a distraction.

“If you feel you must.”

Eames grins. And does.

\--

Arthur gets a call from Adams by the time Eames is about to board his flight for Mombasa. He looks at Eames, who mimes breaking the phone, before doing just that. It doesn’t hurt that ditching the phone will not only break Adams’ trail to him, but Miles’s as well. Something about Miles being able to track him down still doesn’t sit right with him. It’s not something Miles was ever able to do, or ever wanted to do. But Adams—and Miles, as far as Arthur’s knows—had only Arthur’s number, so Eames is safe to keep his phone. It makes it easier for them to be able to get in touch again once Arthur crosses a few borders and can buy a new one.  

He pulls over at a small shopping mall halfway down I-10 somewhere in Arizona and uses cash to buy a mobile phone in one of its small stores.

“Picked up a new number,” he sends Eames as he eats a quick meal. He’s still parked in the shopping mall’s parking lot, sitting in his car and watching people come and go.  

The response is rather quick, considering Arthur expected Eames to be on a plane to Mombasa at the moment.

“Efficient as always. Will call if Cobb’s still bonkers?”

Arthur sighs. Doesn’t even want to answer that for the sheer jab of it. But he sends a quick affirmative, along with, “Only if you do the same if Yusuf sells you out again.”

Eames’s response is quick. “Thank you, darling.”

Arthur smiles, huffs a small laugh into the empty interior of the car.

\--

Arthur pulls over once more to catch a few hours of sleep before finishing the journey. It seems worth the general lack of sleep and dealing with the fatigue from driving almost nonstop just so he can put this task behind him and get back to normal work. He arrives at Cobb’s house just after five o’clock the next day, just over twenty-six hours after setting off. He pulls up to the curb and idles for a few minutes to take stock of the place. There are lights on in the first floor, toys scattered over the lawn. A green Jeep is in the driveway.

Nothing seems out of place at first glance. The Cobb residence seems like just another part of civilian life. But as Arthur watches he sees a shadow run across the front window. It’s short, the height of a small child. Most likely James running around inside. Arthur focuses on the window, and nods when he sees Cobb’s silhouette walk slowly across, obviously calling to whomever ran ahead of him.

Nothing happens for a few more minutes. Arthur’s about to give up the job, phone Miles and tell him he’s worried about nothing, when another shadow passes in front of the window.

It’s tall, female, and Arthur feels a strange sense of uncomfortable surprise shoot through him. There’s a woman inside.

Just when Arthur feels rational thought settling back in—Cobb hired a housekeeper to help him clean, Cobb’s neighbor is over helping with the kids, Cobb hired a babysitter and has just returned home—he sees Phillipa run into the front yard from around the side of the house. She has a butterfly net in her hand, is looking up toward the leaves of the cottonwood trees that line the porch wrapping around the front of the house. It’s late in the evening for butterflies—night’s startling to settle in—but she doesn’t seem to mind.

The front door opens and Arthur ignores it in favor of watching Phillipa wave the net as she tries to catch a falling leaf.

“Phillipa!” a voice calls from the front door, the accent thick and French and stilling Arthur’s heart. “Come in and freshen up for dinner!”

Arthur’s gaze snaps around and he feels like he’s in zero-g again. Mal stands on the porch. She’s wearing a simple dress, and her hair is swept back in a soft wave. She puts a hand on her hip, but her expression as she watches Phillipa try to catch another leaf before she turns and runs to the door is calm, serene.

As she turns to close the front door she spots Arthur’s car. Arthur’s a long distance away, but he can see the moment her gaze goes through the windshield and she sees him. She stands a little taller, body stilling for one breath, two.

And then Arthur sees a smile pull her lips back, and she grins at him as she lifts a hand and calls his name.

\--

The thing about Dom is that he’s brilliant. Arthur knew that the first time he laid eyes on him. But there is such as thing as being _too_ brilliant. Icarus knew that well, and Arthur doesn’t think Dom—or Mal, for that matter—is much different than the Greek legend. Dom doesn’t know limits, pushes at boundaries and bounds of reason constantly, despite seeing danger ahead of him. Arthur once thought Dom believed himself to be immune to the fallout. But he’s come to realize, since working with him, that Dom doesn’t believe himself to be immune from the consequences of a job or experiment gone wrong so much as he doesn’t believe consequences even exist. At least not for him. Everything is fixable. 

Which is why, when Arthur is forced to get out of his car when Dom comes to see what Mal is looking at and his face falls into a blank expression as his gaze lands on Arthur, Arthur’s blood runs cold. All of them must have been blind to the consequences and the fallout of dreamshare technology, same as the Cobb, Arthur thinks, if bringing the dead back to life is one such consequence.

\--

Cobb keeps shooting him warning looks, jaw tensing, when Arthur follows them into the house. But he’s polite, greets Arthur like the old friend and coworker he used to be, and offers him a seat on his couch, to make himself at home.

Mal asks him to stay for dinner. Arthur’s stomach growls, but he forces himself to smile and politely decline.

And Mal… smiles back.

“If you change your mind, all you have to do is ask,” she says, her accent thick and sweet. Nothing in her tone or in her stance sends Arthur back to bullets in his knee, dreams collapsing, the shadow wrath that haunted job after job for months. A year. Arthur’s mouth goes dry.

His hands are hanging lose at his sides, ready to make a grab for his Glock tucked just under his jacket. But as he watches Mal turn and walk back into the kitchen, his fingers twitch, relax, and he lets her go.

When the Cobbs have gathered in the dining room for dinner, he grabs his die instead. He rolls a four. Then four again. Keeps rolling a four, the red and white stark on the dark wood of Mal’s coffee table.

And it is Mal’s, the table. Cobb’s taste in furniture ran nothing like this. Arthur looks around and notices pictures standing sentinel in elegant frames. James clutching at Mal’s leg while Phillipa smiles broadly at the camera. Cobb’s hand is clutching Mal’s tightly. Judging by the height and haircuts of the kids, the picture looks less than a month old. Phillipa had been old enough when Mal died to recognize what was happening, that her mother was never coming back. And yet in the pictures, in reality, she doesn’t seem disturbed at all. Like everything’s normal, back as it should be.

The sounds of the Cobbs’ dinner wafts through the dining room doorway into the living room, and Arthur feels sweat cling to his shirt, to his back. Mal’s laughter rings out, clear and happy, and Cobb joins in with her, followed by James’s staccato laughter, Phillipa’s giggling, and Arthur feels the room spin.

He’s outside on the porch steps, his phone pressed to his ear, when he finds the world finally stilling.

“Isn’t this a pleasant surprise,” Eames says as soon as the line picks up. “I’d thought you be knee deep in Cobb hospitality.”

“Adams isn’t fucking with us, is he?”

Eames pauses for only a moment, but when he speaks next the subtle amusement that tinged his voice before is now gone. His voice is calm, measured. Arthur’s heard that tone plenty of times when Eames has tried to talk tempers down.

“I don’t think Adams would be clever enough to fuck with us in any way that you’re implying, Arthur. So no, I don’t believe he is.” He pauses. “How are things in your neck of the woods?”

Arthur rubs his free hand over his face and realizes his hand is trembling.

“Not so great, if you want the truth,” he admits.

“Okay...” There’s background noise leaking in behind the shitty connection and Eames’s scratchy voice. There’s a rush of Swahili, and Arthur thinks he hears the clinking of a glass vial. Like a beaker.

He reaches into his pocket, feels the familiar weight and size of his die, the familiar notches in the acrylic.

“What’s wrong?” Eames says, and Arthur hears the background noise fade away, as if Eames is walking away from a crowded room into somewhere private. “We talking about backup, safe house, manpower?”

“I don’t even know myself yet,” he says, voice quiet.

Eames doesn’t speak for a moment. “Hold on, did just you just admit that you don’t know something?”

Arthur frowns. “This is hardly the time—” he stops abruptly. The Cobbs must be done with dinner, because he can hear a pair of footsteps approaching the front door. He remains silent, lowers his phone from his ear when he hears Eames’s concerned inquiry. He figures the footsteps will pass on by, but after a moment they stop just on the opposite side of the front door. The door opens.

“Arthur?”

Arthur’s fingers twitch around the phone. It’s Mal.

“Yeah?”

“We’re going to start dessert. Will you be joining us?”

Arthur turns so that Mal is in the corner of his sight lines, just visible. She’s leaning casually in the doorway. Something hangs from her right hand, and Arthur tenses, turns a little more to see what’s in her grasp. His muscles relax when he realizes it’s just a dishtowel.

“No thanks,” he says. “Still not all that hungry.”

Mal nods. Her lips quirk up at the corner, something resembling fond and just a bit concerned. Arthur feels, oddly, a bit of guilt and yearning mix with the fear that’s been creeping up on him since setting eyes on her.

“If you get hungry, leftovers are in the fridge.”

Arthur forces a smile. “Thanks.”

Mal’s smile turns genuine as she steps back and closes the door, leaving Arthur by himself once again. His heart pounds a rapid rhythm against his chest.

Eames is silent on the phone when Arthur raises it back up to his ear. He hears the rustle of fabric, the sound of a plastic chip hitting a wooden table.

“I didn’t watch _Vertigo_ last night,” he finally says. “And my totem tells me this isn’t some bleeding Hitchcockian dream with the PASIV you’ve set up. So unless you’ve perfected forging in real life better than I ever have in dreams, I’d say we’re in a bit of a bind.”

“If you want to understate it.” Arthur keeps his voice quiet and the front of the house in his line of sight.

“Well, bloody hell…”

Arthur doesn’t respond. Doesn’t think there is anything he can say to that. He drops his gaze from the front door to the porch. The wood is splintering. Worn from years of foot traffic, family portraits, comings and goings of generations even before the Cobbs moved in.

Noise reaches him from the house again. The sound of Phillipa and James running, laughing, and the alto lilt of Mal calling them. It all leaks through the walls of the house, seeps into the night.

Eames’s voice brings his attention back into focus. “I think Miles underestimated the situation at hand.”

Arthur huffs a laugh. “You think?”

“On occasion.” Eames sighs. “Listen, some stuff is going on here too. I don’t know what exactly, but…”

Arthur sits up straighter. His throat feels tight. “But?”

“But Yusuf’s not been himself since I’ve been here. I’m going to try to weasel the truth out of him by tomorrow. I’ll let you know where I am after that. But hop on a flight if you need to, or I’ll be on the next flight out. What have you.”

Arthur sighs. He should probably stick around and figure out what’s happening here. But it feels off, wrong. He wants to get as far away from it as he can. At least until he can come back with Eames as backup. The prospect of getting away shouldn’t have him so relieved, not when he’s worked countless jobs with varying levels and kinds of danger before. But this feels different than everything that’s comes before. It’s a subtle danger, one he feels crawling under his skin and lodging there instead of jumping out and shocking him into action. It feels more dangerous, more lethal, and it has him on edge.

He didn’t make Miles any promises, though. If he walked away now he wouldn’t be breaking any deals, any jobs. He said he’d report what he found to Miles, that’s it. Make sure the kids weren’t in any danger. And so far, Phillipa and James seem safe, even if their mother should by all accounts be dead for almost the past two years. If Mal poses a threat to anyone, that threat doesn’t seem to apply to her kids.

Arthur nods even though Eames can’t see him. “Okay. Yeah."

Eames huffs into the phone. “We landed in a big pile, haven’t we.”

Arthur smiles, folds his hand around his die. “Hopefully not.”

“Keep hoping, sweetheart.”

Arthur almost laughs out loud at that. Stops himself just barely when he hears the Cobbs in the house moving around again.

“Listen,” he says after a moment of silence. “I have to call Miles back.”

There’s a soft hum from the other end of the phone. “If you think it’s important. Be careful, hm?” His voice is gentled, almost sounds fond.

“Yeah.” He takes a breath, feels steadied by Eames’s soft tone. “I’ll call you in an hour,” he says. And Eames gives a quick goodbye before hanging up.

\--

Arthur heads back into the house with every intention of saying his goodbyes and departing within two minutes. But he has a moment of conscience. He must have been outside longer than he thought, because James is running around in his pajamas now and Phillipa is trying to bargain with Cobb about staying up another half an hour to play a game.

He looks at Phillipa begging her father, at James taking a flying leap into Mal’s lap, and wonders how he ever ended up here. His promise to Miles, the part about making sure the kids are safe, comes to the forefront of his mind. Not only that, he finds he actually wants to see the kids safe. So Arthur does what comes naturally to him and sticks around and watches and gathers information

Phillipa does end up getting more time to play a game. And seeing as Arthur is a guest, he’s involved. He plays Shoots and Ladders, almost wins before he sees Mal throw her winning streak. Phillipa’s cheer reminds him to follow in Mal’s footsteps and let her win.  

He watches, waits. And yet Mal never does anything untoward. It doesn’t mean he feels less guarded; she watches him as well. In odd moments he’ll look up, expecting her to be absorbed in the game and in her daughter. Instead, her gaze is on him, her stare unflinching, fixed.

She’s on her guard. It leaves Arthur feeling unsettled and exposed. But to the kids she’s nothing but attentive and affectionate.

After the game is over, Mal and Cobb put the kids to bed. Cobb gives him a look as he passes by with James in his arms, and Arthur knows he’s overstayed his welcome. While Mal has been keeping an eye on him, Cobb has been increasingly showing signs of irritation. Short, abrupt movements, sitting out of the last game despite Phillipa’s protests. Seeing Cobb like this sends off warning bells of a different kind. Arthur knows he should leave now, but he has one more thing he needs to try.

Arthur positions himself at the end of the hallway that leads to the bedrooms. He checks his Glock before he leans against the wall, affecting casualness. His vantage point lets him see the living room, the front door beyond, as well as James and Phillipa’s bedrooms.

Arthur hears the rush of water in the sink, just soft enough that he can hear Mal counting brush strokes as James brushes his teeth. He listens to the cadence of her voice, waits for any other sound or warning to appear. But nothing happens.

Dom is the first one to emerge from the bedrooms. He looks surprised to see Arthur waiting at the end of the hall, but then checks to see that Mal’s putting James to bed before joining him.

“Thanks for an interesting evening,” Arthur says.

“I know what you’re going to say,” Cobb says.

“And?” Arthur says. “You’re still going along with this?”

Cobb squints. “With what?”

“Really, Dom? A fucking zombie’s walking around your house, and you’re going to play dumb?”

“It’s her.” Cobb looks at him and Arthur sees the pleading in his eyes, willing Arthur to believe him, to go along with whatever’s happening to them.

“It can’t be—”

“You didn’t know her like I did. No one did. I _know_ , Arthur.”

Arthur feels hot anger rush through his body. “Miles called. He’s wondering why you’ve cut the kids off from him and Marie.”

Cobb visibly stiffens. “He sent you here?”

“You haven’t told him,” Arthur says. His anger suddenly spikes. The hall feels warmer. “She’s his daughter, and you haven’t even thought to mention—”

Cobb turns and walks away.

“My car’s out front,” Arthur says, changing tactics. “I still owe you a few favors. I can give you and the kids a ride—”

“I’m not leaving.”

Cobb’s words come down like a butcher’s knife, finite. And Arthur knows it’s useless to keep going. Cobb’s pleading, agitated demeanor has been replaced with anger, resentment. Stubbornness. Arthur became all too familiar with it before the Fischer job and Cobb had a chance to clear his name.

Nothing Arthur says is going to make any difference.

Out of his peripheral vision, Arthur sees a shadow shift in James’s bedroom doorway. Something dark hovers just out of sight. His heart shoots up into his throat. The shadow moves, seems to rise from a crouch, and Arthur jerks around.

Mal emerges from James’s room. She pulls the door shut behind her, just enough so that a sliver of light can make its way from the hallway into James’s room for his comfort.

When she looks up, she sees Arthur and smiles. It’s soft, and charming, and kind.

Arthur tenses.

“Arthur,” she says. “Can I get you anything, now that James and Phillipa are in bed?”

Arthur opens his mouth to decline, but Cobb beats him to it.

“He was just saying he had to leave,” Cobb says. The hand that lands on Arthur’s shoulder looks soft, congenial, but Cobb’s finger press deep into the muscles. Arthur shrugs out from under him, doesn’t bother to hide his glare.

Mal looks back and forth between them. “If you must. But you can stay tonight if you don’t have somewhere else to go. There’s a guest room in the back.”

“I’m good. Thanks.”

“I’ll see him out,” Cobb says.

“Thanks for a lovely evening,” he says. Doesn’t hold back his frustration, his sudden anger. Regrets it a moment later when just as he opens the front door and his feet hit the wood of the front deck, Mal speaks.

“Are you sure you can’t stay, Arthur?”

The request is normal enough. Spoken rather kindly. But there’s an edge to it that brings Arthur back to dreamspace, makes his knee ache in a phantom memory of torture. He turns around at the base of the front steps. Mal and Dom are standing in the front door, silhouetted by the lamplight from inside.

Darkness has fallen completely since the last time he was out here. No one’s bothered to turn on the porch light. Their faces are completely in shadow.

“I’m sure.”

“All right.” She shifts a little, just enough so that the soft glow from the inside light falls upon her face, and Arthur sees her gaze flicker around his face. Her eyes are sharp, expression incredibly focused, and Arthur can’t help but feel as though she’s looking for something. He keeps his expression as blank as he can, keeps his stance loose, hands tucked casually away in his pockets. His fingers brush the warmed metal of the Glock he has access to through a slit in his pocket.

He must pull off the casual act though, because between one breath and the next the tension leaves Mal and she smiles.

“Goodnight, Arthur,” she says. Her voice is warm.

“Goodnight, Mal.” Arthur turns. For the entire length of the walk back to his car he keeps his fingers locked around the warm metal of the gun. The only time he releases it is when he has to unlock the car door and slide in.

He locks the car doors as soon as he gets in and starts the engine quickly. Just before pulling away, he looks back at the house.

Mal’s frame is silhouetted in the doorway. Cobb stands behind her, a little apart. He watches Arthur for a moment before he finally turns and heads into the house. But Mal stays.

Her frame is slim, familiar, and Arthur is on the verge of relaxing his guard, thinking this is all just some big mistake, that maybe there are some things that you do come back from no matter how much time has passed, when Mal moves.

There’s a small shrug to her shoulder, a shift of her hip, and then she raises a hand in silent farewell. It’s normal, mundane, but Arthur continues to watch her. And when she turns away, the light from the hall catches her features before she shuts the door and leaves Arthur alone in the night, his blood gone cold.

All night Arthur stared at her when he could, tried to find some crack in the veneer she presented. And had been unable to see a thing. She’d looked and acted exactly as Mal had. 

But just as she turns away, for just a moment, he could swear her lips were stained red and her eyes reflected the yellow hall light back with a red glare.

\--

Arthur’s hands stay locked, white-knuckled around the wheel until he’s on the highway, heading quickly away from the Cobbs. Even as the distance increases he checks the review mirror every few minutes. No cars appear behind him, not for a few miles. But even when they do, the cars are nondescript, unfamiliar, and though they try to catch up, they fail.

Arthur shifts gears and feels the car tremble beneath him as he hits 100 m.p.h.

Half an hour later, when he’s put enough distance between the Cobb’s house and himself that he can drive steadily without speeding, he reaches for his cell phone and dials a number he’s committed to memory. It picks up on the second ring.

“Hello?” Miles’s voice is tired.

“Miles,” he says. “It’s Arthur.”

He expects Miles to ask him about Dom. If he’s seen him, how the kids are. 

But instead he hears an utterly confused, “Arthur?” Then, “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

Miles sounds genuinely surprised to hear Arthur on the line. Like it has been years since Arthur’s talked to him instead of just two days.

“I got in touch with Cobb,” Arthur ventures.

There’s a pause on the line, and when Miles speaks next it’s like a switch has flicked. Confusion is gone, replaced by a sense of wary curiosity.

“You were able to reach him?”

Arthur settles a little, his grip on the wheel relaxing. Maybe he was imagining the confusion in Miles’s voice. 

“Yeah. I arrived at his house this evening. Saw—”

He stops abruptly. There’s still an unsettled feeling in his gut. Something that’s stopping him from telling Miles what he actually saw. That his daughter, or something that looks like her, is walking around playing with his grandchildren, cooking them dinner, acting the loving wife to Cobb again. Arthur’s been saved by hunches before, by instinct, and his gut is telling him to proceed carefully now.

“Arthur?”

“They’re great. James and Phillipa. They’re good.”

“Okay.” Miles’s words are unsure again. Stilted. Like he doesn’t quite know what Arthur’s talking about. “That’s… good to know. I haven’t been able to reach Cobb for the past week or two. I was starting to wonder. But something’s keeping me here. I… actually. Maybe you can help me.”

Arthur frowns. “Sure. But… weren’t you going to fly out here on Thursday?”

There’s a long pause on the other end of the line.

“No. Matters here are keeping me quite busy. Where did you hear that?” He’s starting to sound concerned again, albeit slightly curious. And sharper. As if looking for the solution to a problem.

“I…” Arthur stops. “When was the last time I talked to you?” he says.

“Arthur, I haven’t talked to you since Project Somnacin.”

Arthur feels his body go cold. Arthur worked with Miles on stage three of Project Somnacin. They’d worked the severe kinks out of the PASIV Device, and those who had escaped the severe side effects of stage one and two were able to perfect Somnacin and actually start dreaming up worlds that didn’t collapse around them and send them rolling out of unconsciousness.

Project Somnacin was seven years ago.

“Right,” he says. “You’re still stationed in Paris.”

“Should I be telling you this?” And there. That’s the wariness bred into Miles and all men that were drafted from academia to help the army with the PASIV Device.

“I think you should.”

“Then yes,” Miles says. “And if that’s the case, I think there’s something here that you need to see. And could help me with, since Dom's been difficult to contact.”

“Cobb’s…” he stops. Wary. Whoever called and led him to Cobb’s house tonight wasn’t Miles, even though it sounded exactly like him. Arthur needs to be careful what he tells whom, even more so now. “Cobb’s out of dreamshare,” he says. “Has no intention of coming back in.” He pauses, looks at a road sign for LAX, and merges over two lanes to make the exit. “What’s the problem?”

“It’s Ariadne.” Miles pauses, and Arthur can hear him stand, the sound of shuffling feet, the click of a door closing. “You remember her?”

“Of course,” Arthur says. “The architect on the Fischer job. You recommended her to Cobb. She was great. But she left dreamshare alone after, went back to school, I thought.”

“We all thought.”

“Excuse me?”

“We were wrong it seems. She’s in a coma. She went to bed, but never woke up. I did some digging. She’d been working with an extractor for a few days last month.”

“A coma?”

“No one can explain it. And no one’s going near her with the PASIV incase there’s some nasty subconscious stuff.”

“And you thought Cobb might be able to handle it.”

“No. I thought he might know who could.” Miles pauses. “I could use some help. I don’t dream anymore. Not for anyone.”

“Yeah. I’ll…” Arthur stops.

Everything is out of whack. Someone who apparently wasn’t Miles called him, started him on this wild goose chase. A Mal doppelgänger is walking around Cobb’s house. Ariadne’s in a coma. It’s one strange event leading to another.

Arthur can’t reach into his pocket to check his totem. Not when he wants to drive and use the phone at the same time. He has to keep driving, flexes his fingers on the steering wheel.

“You didn’t call me three days ago?” he finally asks. Can’t help it. “Asking me to look in on Cobb?”

“No.” Miles sounds resigned. Tired. Like he’s used to hearing people question reality, and is frankly tired of it. “I haven’t talked to you in years until five minutes ago.”

Arthur nods.

The thing about Arthur is that he became a point man for a reason. He’s smart, quick, efficient. People tend to rely and trust him implicitly within a short amount of time. He can charm people when he wants to, put out kneecaps the rest of the time. But at the bottom of all of it, why he let the army push him into the PASIV project and then, instead of going legit with it and delving deeper into their form of experiment, using it for testing only, he stole a PASIV Device and followed in Eames’s footsteps when he went AWOL. At the bottom of it, fueling everything, is a sharp, insatiable curiosity. Maybe he should walk away from this situation, but a large part of him won't allow it. 

“I’ll find you,” Arthur says. “Meet you in Paris in a few days time. Figure it out.”

“Thank you,” Miles says. Arthur hangs up before the words fade to silence in the car.

\--

The highway is empty now, trees and metal guard rails flicking by in his headlights in the endless dark expanse. Arthur has the heat going in the car, but he still feels cold.

He dials Eames’s number and repeats a silent plea for Eames to pick up.

He holds back a breath of relief when Eames answers his call.

“Hello, dear.”

“We have a problem.”

“A bigger one, you mean, than a zombie running around?”

“How do you feel about a job in Paris?”

Eames pauses. “I thought you were retiring from that stomping ground.”

“Something’s come up.”

“A job.”

“Of sorts.”

“Of sorts?” Eames snorts. “You have to use a little specificity if you want to convince me you’d go from needing to hideout to accepting a job in Paris in the course of two hours.”

“Ariadne’s in a coma.”

“At the risk of sounding a tad harsh, I fail to see how that affects us.”

“It doesn’t,” he admits. “But it seems to be dreamshare related. And…” he pauses. “Miles’s call a few days ago? That wasn’t him.”

“What do you mean that wasn’t him?”

“I mean, whoever called sounded like him. He told me to check in on Cobb, and Cobb’s hanging out with Mal. But I call Miles just now and he says the first time he talked to me in seven years is tonight.”

Eames is silent for a moment. “Maybe he’s going senile.”

“I don’t think so. It’s too bizarre of a coincidence. And how do you explain Mal?”

“So… you want to run headlong into the mystery that is a doppelgänger phone call, a zombie, and whatever issue Ariadne’s having?” He sounds not only skeptical, but also impressed that Arthur’s considering it. “You’ve got balls.”

Arthur scoffs. “You’d know.”

Eames’s laugh is delighted. “Arthur.” It’s practically a purr.

Arthur grins, feeling somewhat lighter. “We’re horrible people, if we’re joking at a time like this.”

“We’re conmen, darling. It comes with the job description.”

Arthur huffs, but doesn’t stop smiling.

“So.” Eames sighs into the phone. “Ariadne. Miles. What's the story?”

“Ariadne went under with some extractor a few weeks ago, apparently. She’s currently in a coma. They can’t wake her up.”

Eames grunts. “Who was under with her at the time?”

“That’s the thing. She wasn’t under. Not at the time. She just… went to bed and didn’t wake up.”

“Bloody hell…”

“I wouldn’t take any other jobs until we straighten this stuff out,” Arthur finds himself saying. Concern is creeping up on him, making him wary of what Eames is doing with Yusuf’s new experiments in dreaming.

But Eames says, “Obviously.”

Arthur grunts. “This entire thing isn’t sitting right with me.”

“Can’t imagine that it would.”

There’s silence for a few minutes. Arthur sinks into it, watches the road rise up to meet him before falling under the relentless turn of the wheels.

“What Yusuf is doing with his experiments,” he finally says. “You think it’s safe to continue with it?”

“Actually, we haven’t done much of anything. I’ll explain when I meet up with you.”  

Arthur shifts in his seat. “Don’t go under with him.”

“As you wish,” Eames says. Arthur frowns, is about to call Eames out for mocking him, when Eames comes back with, “I won’t.” Plain and simple and sincere.

“Thank you,” Arthur says. Lets some relief leak out into his tone. “I’m heading to the airport now. I can be in Paris in about a day. I’ll send my flight details to you as soon as I get them.”

“Ever reliable, thank you.” Arthur hears Eames shift around on the other end of the line. He’s about to end the call when Eames comes back with, “I have a safe house just outside of Paris. On the edge of the city. If you’d rather bunker down in a place with security, we can go there rather than to a random hotel.”

The offer sends a shock of warm heat through Arthur. They’ve been working together exclusively for months now. Years ago the offer wouldn’t have been odd. They’d been friends, close, after working on Project Somnacin together. It’s starting to feel right and normal again between them now, but this is the first time one of them has allowed the other a chance to glimpse something more personal since then. He hesitates a moment, measures his breaths by the beats of his heart, tries to slow its rhythm. He opens his mouth, unsure of what his answer is.

What comes out is, “Sure. Why not, if it lets us work in a bit more privacy.”

“Excellent.” Eames sounds unexpectedly chipper at the agreement. “Booking a hotel suite is one less task you’ll have to accomplish now.”

Arthur grunts. “If you say so.” He pauses. Is surprised that he feels relatively calm. “You think you’ll be done with Yusuf by the time I’m in Paris?”

“I will be on a flight whether Yusuf gives up his secrets or not.”  

\--

Arthur’s starting to feel a stupor set in by the time he sets foot in Paris. Three days driving plus a twenty-four-hour flight in which he couldn’t catch a moment of sleep are finally catching up to him. He waits for Eames in the airport, downing three coffees and a stale sandwich before his flight lands. He feels gritty-eyed, a headache is pounding in his skull, and he knows he must look like a mess. But Eames catches sight of him, smiles, nods in his direction, and Arthur can’t help but flash a small smile back at him. He feels something like relief settle into him, loosening his muscles and making his headache lessen.

Arthur allows Eames to get behind the steering wheel of their rented car and settles into the passenger seat. He leans back and lets himself unwind just a little bit now that Eames is here and has his back.

“What a bloody mess this has turned out to be,” Eames says a few minutes after they set off. Arthur thinks he means the morning traffic they find themselves in, but when he looks at him, Eames continues, “Compounds gone wrong. People acting a little…”

“Off?” Arthur finishes. “Dead people popping up from the grave like zombies?”

“There is that, yes,” Eames says.

Arthur sighs. Paris crawls by outside his window. He watches the people, keeps an eye out, wonders if he’s going to start seeing any more doubles walking the streets.

“Maybe we should’ve stuck with the Adams job,” Eames says, mock serious, and Arthur can’t help but crack a small smile.

“If you like the boring, mundane, working-for-wackos jobs, maybe.”

Eames makes an offended sound, but he’s smiling.

“Did you pry Yusuf’s secrets out of him?”

Eames sobers up, and Arthur feels his good humor fading. He looks over at Arthur, gaze flickering over him. Arthur must look horrible, or else like he’s half asleep, because Eames says, “Let’s get some coffee in us before I flood you with all the details.”   

Arthur should push the issue, but they have hours before they have to meet Miles and nothing to do in the meantime.

“Yeah. Alright.” The morning traffic has slowed to a crawl. It seems a reflection of his own mental state, finally starting to fog and slow down after all the hours of travel and worry. Arthur feels his eyelids begin to droop, and he clears his throat, stretches a little in his seat. 

“Feel free to kip out for a few minutes if you feel the need,” Eames says. A small smirk is playing around his lips.

“I’m fine, thanks.”

He ignores the soft chuckle from Eames.

Arthur means to stay awake, but the soft hum of the car, the slow pace they’ve set, start to lull him into a half doze. He tries to rouse himself once, but it doesn’t help.

So the next time Arthur’s eyelids begin to droop, his blinks becoming longer each time, he lets them close and exhaustion drag him down.

\--

Arthur hasn’t dreamt since before Project Somnacin. It was the least of the side effects from the early versions of the chemical, and Arthur’s lucky that’s all he suffers from. Other people had been unable to sleep period, their brain chemistry altered to the point where sleep became impossible. A few men Arthur had known and trained alongside had been awake for weeks, months, before they couldn’t stand it and taken their own lives. Other men had been driven insane.

Others still had started seeing images, as if they were dreaming even as they were awake.

Arthur couldn’t be sure which was worse: Succumbing to madness, or living it every day. In the end, he’d decided to be grateful. Not being able to dream naturally was a small price to pay when you worked in dream technology and the alternative was to lose your sanity.

But as Arthur drifts in the familiar darkness of the space where dreams should be, the red darkness behind his eyelids turns darker, and the red coalesces and forms shapes behind his eyelids. He feels like he’s moving independently of the car, arms swinging shortly, legs walking through water.

He’s walking. The ground underneath him solidifies into painted concrete, rises up to form tiled walls, and Arthur recognizes the training facility of Project Somnacin. Men are standing at attention, listening to orders on how the base and operation are to be run. And Arthur recognizes this too. It’s the first day he’d been assigned to work on and train for the PASIV Device. He’d come straight from his tour in Iraq, ready to go home, but the Army’d had other ideas and sent him here.

It’s a memory, Arthur thinks. He’s living a memory again. But he can feel the course fabric of his jacket under his palms, feel the sweat pooling under his uniform, and physical sensations aren’t tangible in a memory, not like this.

He looks around and starts when he sees a familiar figure. Eames is standing a short distance away. This was when he’d first seen Eames. He’d been working on the international team, straight out of MI-6. Arthur had let his gaze roam for just a moment before he’d seen the blank face and rigid stance. He was about to look away when Eames caught his eye, held it for one breath, two. When they were dismissed, he expected Eames to file out with the rest of the men. But he’d lingered, waited for Arthur to move before falling into step at his side. He’d made a rather funny, if rude, comment about Arthur’s commanding officer. Arthur doesn’t remember what it was, just that it was amusing and left him wondering if this man was trying to throw him off his game, catch him off-guard, or if he was genuine.

He was genuine, as it turned out. Arthur learned that over the next several weeks. Eames was distant, but there moments when they’d work together and Eames would let something slip from his calm façade. Arthur felt like they were in on some joke, or a secret.

But as Arthur looks again now, Eames is gone. Men are filing out of the room, and though Eames hadn’t filed out with them on that day, he seems to have done so now. Arthur remains stationary and watches the men in front of him move out.

A sound—a rattling scrape of metal on concrete—behind him draws his attention. No one else seems to hear it, but it’s loud, and when it happens again Arthur turns. There’s a doorway. The door swings slowly open, but no one is on the other side. Nothing is on the other side, as far as Arthur can tell. Just darkness.

He feels the last of the men exit the room behind him, hears the door they exited through click shut, and he’s alone.  

Arthur watches. The darkness is complete on the opposite side of the threshold. It feels odd, like he should see a figure lurking just out of clear focus in the darkness. He thinks, after a moment, he hears a faint dragging sound from just beyond sight. Anticipation builds and small tremors start in his body as his muscles tense.

“Hello?” he calls.

A faint rumbling, like a growl or roll of thunder, answers.

Arthur reaches for his sidearm, and only when he touches it does he freeze. He wasn’t allowed to carry his firearm that day. Not on any day when they were testing out the compounds, and they’d gone directly from debriefing to the lab. He swallows, lets his hand fall to his pocket, and feels his die against his fingertips. He didn’t have a totem yet either, not for months after he’d been using the PASIV.  

There’s movement in the blackness. Arthur doesn’t know how he sees it, but he does. It’s almost like the blackness itself is moving, swirling slowly and forming something solid, darker than itself.

Arthur flinches for his gun when a figure emerges. Shock tears through him when he recognizes Eames.

Arthur watches him warily, fingers still around his gun. “Eames?” This can’t be a memory anymore. Eames’s hair is buzzed like that day, but he seems taller, broader, and when he walks forward, hands in pockets, he’s smirking, seems much more confident and open than he ever was in the training base.

“Stand down, agent,” Eames says. His eyes flicker to Arthur’s gun. Arthur hesitates a moment, then lowers it.

“Alright, love?”

And Arthur knows he’s dreaming. Eames never called him that. Not in their army days. Not even in the days and years after.

He reaches for his die again. Has to. And when he wraps his fingers around it, he feels a wave of dizziness sweep over him. For just a moment, his die is the right weight, the right feel. This can’t be a dream.

“Arthur,” and that’s Eames’s voice as it is now, warm and drawing him out of himself. A hand closes around Arthur’s. Arthur doesn’t know when Eames moved so close. But he holds Arthur’s die between their palms. His hand is soft, warm, but when Arthur looks down he sees something like dark mist swirl around their joined hands.

“Did you put me under or something?”

Eames’s grip tightens before he shifts his hold. His fingers loosen, open, draw Arthur’s fist open with it

His die is in his palm, but as he looks, he sees it waver, melt, reform. When it stops, it’s white, red dots painted on. It looks like bone, like spots of blood.

“Not the conventional way, no.” Eames’s fingers are warm on the side of Arthur’s palm. “You fell asleep. I thought I’d join you.”

“What?”

Arthur looks up, feeling sick to his stomach. Eames is already watching him. There’s an intense concentration lining his features, giving his face a stern look. As he watches, Eames smiles a little, smirks, and Arthur sees something in him shift. The mist around their hands crawls upward, sinks into Eames’s skin and casts shadows on his face. His features turn sharp.

And in the shadows, Arthur sees his eyes change. His pupils dilate, fill in the whites of his eyes, until Arthur is staring at black eyes. They start to turn red.

“Eames…”

Arthur tries to take a step back, but Eames’s hand around his is suddenly tight, holding him in place. Arthur feels his pulse beating in his temple.

A siren goes off in the base, loud and shrill. It's the signal for a breached perimeter. Arthur’s head throbs with the sound, and he tries to pull his hands back, tries to cover his ears, but Eames won’t release his grip.

He looks up, mouth open to protest, but freezes. Eames’s eyes are completely red, his skin completely made of shadow. The ground wavers beneath Arthur’s feet and he falls.

Arthur jolts awake, hands flying out to grasp what they can to keep steady.

“Hey, hey, you’re alright.”

Eames’s voice startles him again, and Arthur jerks to the side, looks at Eames. He looks as he did this morning. Creased shirt, tidy hair brushed to the side, eyes… blue. Arthur stares for a moment more, trying to reassure himself that Eames is Eames. His hand is already pushing into his pocket, closing around his die. He pulls it out, looks at it. It remains the same.

“Arthur?” Eames’s voice comes calm, quiet. Like when he talks to a spooked mark in dreamspace. “Alright over there?”

Arthur looks back up. Eames is trying to watch the road even as he takes quick, worried glances at him.

“Yeah. I’m good.”

“Sure, mate?”

Arthur looks at the street and clears his throat. He feels sweat pooling at the small of his back, under his arms. He lifts a hand, feeling shaky as he brushes his hair back from his face.

Arthur doesn’t dream. Not anymore. But that wasn’t a memory. No way it ever could be. Not in the world Arthur knows. So if it wasn’t a memory, what was it? If it were a dream, that would mean something’s started to repair the damage that Somnacin caused in Arthur’s brain years ago. Or else… his mind shies away from anything else. Blames it, momentarily, on exhaustion.

“Yeah. Just startled.” He concentrates on the sights passing by the window. He doesn’t feel like talking about it, just wants to settle his heartbeat. Eames, thankfully, seems to pick up on it. He’s quiet for the rest of the ride.  

“Campus isn’t too far off,” Eames says after a bit. “I know a place we can get some coffee. Quiet.”

“Sounds great.” He shifts, anxious now to be out of the car and doing something.  

Eames finds a parking spot just a five-minute walk from campus.

“Up here,” Eames says, nodding to the north. Arthur’s still feeling a little off-balance from the dream and lack of sleep, so it’s easy enough, letting Eames put a hand on the small of his back and take the lead. The warmth from Eames’s hand seeps through Arthur’s shirt, throwing him back to the dream for a moment, spiking his heartbeat. But when Eames’s hand stays, remains gentle, Arthur starts to relax.

Eames leads him to a tiny café. The shop is lined with classic black and white prints, cityscapes, and has a black tiled floor to match. The line to get coffee is short, and before long Arthur grabs his coffee and follows Eames to a booth in the far back corner. Eames shifts around for a moment after they sit, and Arthur smirks, watching as Eames scans the crowd from a prime watchful post.

“So,” he says, drawing Eames’s gaze. “If this job fails because we couldn’t get a good chemist because he’s off on vacation or setting up another dream den, I’m not gonna be responsible for my actions. What did you want to tell me about Yusuf?”

Eames’s gaze lifts from his coffee, sweeps over him, assessing. Making sure Arthur’s recovered from whatever happened in the car. Arthur looks steadily back, lifts an eyebrow. Eames’s lips twitch slightly, but don’t quite form a smile.

“We’re going to have to lump him together with the other odd things happening around here.”

Arthur frowns. “What do you mean?”

“Yusuf’s been wanting me to help him out with a new compound for a while now,” Eames says. “Thought he’d be excited I finally had the time. But after the first few hours of being there, the enthusiasm waned, he became distracted. Distraught, almost. Paranoid. Like he had a secret, and was running from people who might see it. I wormed it out of him soon enough. I think he’d been dealing with it for a while. Was glad to shove the information off to somebody else.”

“What information?”

“It appears as if our favorite chemist has started to see things.”

“What?”

Eames lifts a hand and reaches inside his jacket. Arthur remains perfectly still as he fishes around for something from the inside pocket. It takes him a moment, but when he pulls his arm out, he’s holding a piece of paper. He puts it down on the table and slides it over to Arthur. His finger taps, once, on it before he withdraws his hand.

“Take a look.”

The drawing is done in pencil. Graphite is smudged around the edges, indistinct lines Arthur can only assume are vague impressions of buildings and people. But brought into relief toward the center are odd shapes, rough figures. Thin frames, some standing tall, some hunched over, standing in shadow. Two, three arms protrude from their bodies on each side, and their heads are larger, more top heavy than Arthur’s ever seen in a human. Some have hair flowing down their sides; Arthur can see it in the outlines. Others seem to be carrying weapons of some sort, unless they’re growing other appendages from their backs, their hips.

In the center is a figure that stands out from the rest, clear and concise in its details. Where the rest are shadow figures, mere black forms, this one is drawn in detail. The body is that of a human, slightly feminine in shape, but the head is not human in the slightest. The forehead and chin bulb out. The eyes are large, round, protrude from the sockets, and the mouth that opens into a snarl is lined with sharp, canine teeth. Two fangs drop down from the top jaw. Its ears are more canine than humanoid, but still fall where human ears would be. On the top of its head, amongst ragged hair, is drawn a diadem.

“You drew this.” The words are hard to get out, feel muted in the café’s air. Arthur puts the drawing down, careful, slow, like the drawing itself might come to life at the slightest disturbance.  He stares at it, unnerved.

“Yes. But Yusuf described it to me. Tried to copy it all down as best I could while he kept looking around, like the damn thing was running around him the entire time he was talking to me.” He motions to the paper with a hand. “Said it was pretty much spot on.”

“He was seeing things? _These_ things?” Arthur feels a warning rise up his spine. “He wasn’t under when he saw them? Or… his compounds aren’t starting to have lasting affects on brain chemistry?’”

“No. He was actually seeing them.” He sounds so sure that despite Arthur’s best judgment and demand for facts he can’t help but believe him. Eames reaches forward and taps the drawing again. “He described them to me as if I’d describe you sitting down in front of me right now. I can read people quite well, part of the job description and all that. He was telling the truth.”

“Then…” Arthur falls silent.

Eames picks up the thread for him. “One zombie running around, one girl lost in limbo or something when she wasn’t hooked up to a PASIV, and one brilliant chemist seeing less-than-human creatures outside of dreams. All of the people affected worked the Fischer case.”

“Miles didn’t work the Fischer case.”

Eames shrugs. “No. But he’s not directly affected, is he? It was just his voice that you heard, that led you to the Cobbs in the first place. He himself isn’t dealing with that voice, you are.”

Arthur looks more closely at the drawing and tries to shove aside the unease he feels creeping up his spine. This added peculiarity nudges his thoughts, makes him wonder if his dream, or memory, whatever it was he experienced in the car, is somehow related to what’s happening with Cobb, Ariadne, and Yusuf.

He shakes the thought away. Tries to concentrate on facts. Wracks his brain until his thoughts catch on something solid.

“I’ve seen this before,” he says.

“Have you?”

Arthur looks up to see Eames’s eyebrows raised. There’s the soft impression of a smile around his mouth, as if he’d expected, or hoped, Arthur would say as much.

“Yeah. And you have too, haven’t you. It’s Hindu, right?”

“Correct. Balinese Hindu. Apparently Yusuf has had a change of heart.”

“Change of heart?” Arthur looks down at the drawing, connecting the dots. “These are demons. Religious icons. They… plague people?”

“They can play tricks, teach lessons. But people have also been known to leave offerings for them if they need protection. They have the power to be kind to those who deserve it, or evil to those who incur their wrath.”

“I see…” he looks Eames over.

“I find mythology rather fascinating,” Eames explains at Arthur’s tone. “It’s often a way for people to work out the demons in their own mind, or create tales to explain away strange phenomena.”

“You might be fascinated by it,” Arthur says. “I get that. But it’s a rather religious icon for Yusuf to be drawing. Or seeing, rather.”

“So you noticed our favorite chemist is no religious man.” Eames’s smile deepens. “Never could stomach religions. Too practical a man.”

“Looks like that practicality’s bit him in the ass now.”

“What a lovely way to put it, Arthur.”

“How else do you want me to put it?”

Eames hums, leans back, like he’s suddenly enjoying this conversation. “Poetic justice?”

Arthur laughs. “Are you joking?”

“What’s more poetic than a scientist running mad from a sudden fear of a being from a religion he didn’t think existed—in fact, adamantly denied—for his entire life?”

“You have a point there,” he says. But his laughter lessens. “I thought you two were friends,” he says, curious. Looking Eames over.

Eames shrugs. “Of a sort. How much of friends were you and Cobb?”

Arthur grunts. “Of a sort.”

“Exactly. We all have those co-workers we call friends who we don’t mind doing favors for, but who have sold us out on occasion when the situation called for it. Or benefited them more than said friendship.”

“Are you saying this is some sort of… cosmic payback for what Yusuf pulled on the Fischer job? Not that he doesn’t deserve something, but… what he did, what Cobb did, it’s part of the business.”

“I’m just saying how odd it is that Yusuf’s running from some invisible—except to him—Hindu demon, while Cobb’s cavorting with his dead wife. And suddenly Ariadne’s in a coma just when she started poking her nose back into dreamshare…” he lets his words die out, lifts an eyebrow in Arthur’s direction. “It seems like they’re all answering for something, doesn’t it?”

Arthur fights to keep his breath steady. He was going to bring up the dream he had, but suddenly it seems like a bad idea if everyone is experiencing something for a lesson that had to be learned or for some cosmic payback. Arthur’s no stranger to sin, but he doesn’t know which one he might be called to answer for. Or Eames, for that matter.

“I don’t recall Ariadne doing anything wrong on the Fischer job,” he says, prodding.

“Did you go down into the last dream layer with her?”

“No."

“No one did. But she knew Cobb inside and out after that job. You can’t tell me she didn’t know something about what was going on that we didn’t.”

Arthur doesn’t respond.

“Exactly.” Eames reaches over for his coffee. Arthur watches his hand curl around the coffee cup, lift it halfway to his mouth. He doesn’t drink. “Little Ariadne figured something out.” He looks closely at Arthur. “Something maybe you didn’t want to see about Cobb. But there it is. She’s caught in a coma, Yusuf’s on the run from demons, and Cobb’s off being Cobb with a shade-turned-wife.”

“So everyone’s suffering from some colossal form of cosmic justice, is what you’re trying to say. We all worked the Fischer job. Is that the connecting link here? Unless all of dreamshare is going cock up.” 

Eames shrugs. “Sounds like it. Unless there’s some sort of virus or something going around. Fischer doesn’t have the power to enact this kind of payback, even if he did find out about inception—which he hasn’t, according to all our sources.”

“This is not some too-close school district spreading lice or the flu.”

“No. But think about it. We walk in each other’s dreams, Arthur. We knew there’d be consequences some day.”

“Not like this. This is out of some sort of old school science-fiction novel.”

“Maybe. But there had to be some fallout at some point.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

Eames meets his gaze then. Watches him for a moment, expression suddenly watchful, curious, careful.

“I accepted there’d be risks. For all parties when I got involved in dreamshare.”

Arthur looks Eames over. His shirt is loose, a little rumpled from travel and too many hours spent awake, the same as Arthur. And yet he looks alert as he scans the crowd over the rim of his coffee mug, finally taking a sip. And Arthur is struck with an intense hope that Eames, and himself, won’t be affected by whatever’s going on, if he’s accepted the consequences as such.

“Have you—” Arthur stops abruptly.

Eames gaze lifts from his coffee, settles on him. “Have I what?”

Arthur sighs. “Everyone on the Fischer job seems to be… compromised in some way. You’re not…” he lifts a hand and waggles his fingers in the air.

Eames lifts an eyebrow and repeats the gesture. “What’s that supposed to mean? Am I going loopy too?”

“Not loopy. Geeze. Just… Haven’t been experiencing anything weird?”

“Don’t believe so,” he says. “Unless you call jetlag a sign of something.”

Arthur scoffs. He looks to his own mug, is about to take a sip when Eames says, “Have you?” and pulls him up short.

Arthur thinks back to the car. Maybe he wasn't dreaming after all, he tries to convince himself. Perhaps his mind had just wandered, his imagination getting the better of him despite how real it had felt. He tightens his grip on his mug.

“Don’t believe so,” he says, and takes a sip instead of looking up at Eames. Eames is quiet, too quiet, for a moment. But then Arthur hears him grunt, and a moment later he’s jostled when Eames crosses his legs under the table and knocks Arthur’s shin with his foot in the process.

“Hey,” he says. But Eames is already waving an apology at him. His foot stills, rests pressed against Arthur’s shin under the table. Arthur lets it remain.

They’re quiet a moment. It’s cloudy outside now, the sun watery as it tries to leak through the clouds and reach down in weak streams toward the city and the gray, cracked streets below. Eames is visible out of the corner of his eye, and Arthur tracks his movements more carefully.

Eames is fiddling with the drawing he transcribed from Yusuf’s “visions” or whatever he was calling them. As Arthur watches, Eames reaches into his coat pocket, pulls out another pencil, and starts sketching at the corners of the pages.

“What are you doing?” Arthur asks, turning to face him. “I thought that was Yusuf’s creation, not yours.”

Eames hums. “Same thing once it’s down on paper, isn’t it?”

Arthur waits. Watches. Finally Eames continues, “Yusuf said something the last day I saw him. Something about… walls. I didn’t add them in, because they seemed to go against the creatures flitting about the edges of his vision. But… he mentioned dreaming about walls…”

He stops sketching and turns the paper toward Arthur again. Thick stonewalls border the top of the drawing. They fade out, turn invisible, as they near the bottom of the page, allowing the creatures to walk through them.

“Nice,” Arthur says, tone dry. He tries to push aside his unease. “Are you done?”

“I’d say so, yes.” He sounds pleased with himself.

“Excellent. So.” He pauses. His palms feel damp. “So. This kind of changes things. With everything going on. If you think this is some sort of… contagious justice running around. Are you still in? Do you still want to figure this out? Go under with Ariadne?” It seems like he’s asking more than just that. But Eames doesn’t flinch, doesn’t hesitate.

“If it means meeting Cobb’s father-in-law again, possibly getting my brains turned to mush in a comatose novice dreamer’s brain, and having this thing come after me,” he pointed to the drawing, “then sure. Why not?”

“Could never turn down the easy jobs, could you.” He’s trying not to smile.

“After Cobb’s mad dash through Fischer’s subconscious, I like to think I’ve seen it all.”

“Let’s hope for that,” Arthur says. He looks down at his coffee, feels the heat against his fingers has dissipated as he picks the mug up. He swirls the liquid once, twice, and drinks the rest down, cringing at the bitter grounds at the bottom.

\--

Arthur is on edge about meeting Miles. After getting a call from someone who sounded like him, led him to the Cobbs, and subsequently started him on this trek, he doesn’t know what to expect when he meets with him. He hopes whoever he meets is the _real_ Miles. But he has his gun tucked in its holster, Eames is there to back him up, and the meeting is at a crowded university. He’s pretty secure, he figures. As secure as they’ll ever be in dreamshare when meeting with a new client.   

It turns out, however, that meeting Miles is the most normal event that’s happened to Arthur in the last week. Miles is welcoming, but professional. It’s clear that while he’s glad they’re in Paris to look into what’s going on with Ariadne, he’s also eager to have them out of his office and on their way as soon as possible. Miles never liked working in dreamshare. He’d been dragged into the program by the military, and while he found it fascinating, after his daughter passed away and his son-in-law went AWOL due to it, he’d lost any desire to be mixed up in it again despite any lingering fascination with it.

He’s already put together a dossier for them with all the details he’s been able to gather about Ariadne’s recent delving into dreaming again. They have passes for clearance to the hospital, and there’s the name of a staff member that will let them in and allow them to work undisturbed when they need to.

Arthur runs everything through his checks, but it all clears.

He and Eames spend the rest of the day walking the campus, taking in the layout and talking with Ariadne’s roommate. She confirms everything Miles has said about the circumstances around Ariadne’s coma. Ariadne went to bed and simply didn’t wake up. Her roommate doesn’t know what a PASIV Device is, but mentions no strange object or machinery around Ariadne when she found her. She wasn’t dreaming with a PASIV.

On their way off campus they run into a newsstand. Arthur glances at it absently, but the title of the cover story and the picture of a familiar face catches his eye, focuses his attention, and he stops in the middle of the sidewalk.

Arthur hears Eames calling him amongst a few ruder comments at his sudden stop, but he ignores it and weaves amongst the crowd to get to the newsstand.

“Want to tell me what that was about?” Eames says once he catches up to him, ignoring the looks people throw their way.

In response, Arthur holds up the paper so Eames can clearly read the headline: Billionaire Breaks Up Empire.

“Well,” Eames says after a moment. “Glad we did all that work for nothing. I hope Saito’s enjoying a brilliant retirement at the very least.”

\--

They find a seat on the edge of campus. Saito has, apparently, dissolved a large portion of his empire. Right after he claims he was double-crossed by an associate and his wife filed for divorce. Arthur lets Eames read him the story out loud as he takes his laptop out, checks the facts and dates and sends a few feelers out on whether or not the story is valid in any capacity. Turns out it is.  

“Seem like another case of cosmic justice?” Arthur says, watching for Eames’s reaction.

Eames’s posture is relaxed, laid back, like he’s enjoying an afternoon in the sun, casually reading the paper instead of trying to get to the bottom of some very strange occurrences. He doesn’t look up at Arthur as he responds.

“You said it this time, not me. But yes.”

Arthur shakes his head, runs a hand through his hair. “It’s just… so odd…”

“We’re conmen who creep into people’s dreams, Arthur. We’ve seen some pretty odd things.”

Arthur nods absently. He goes through the facts in his head, tries to find something to latch onto to settle the odd feeling of excitement, like he’s been given another piece to the puzzle he’s trying to solve.

“Maybe I should feel bad or something this happened,” he says, motioning toward the paper, “but….”

“It does seem rather poetic, doesn’t it.”

Arthur glances sideways at Eames.

“We wouldn’t be in this business if you became personally invested in every man and woman you screw over,” Eames says.

And it’s true. Arthur has loyalties. He likes a decent portion of the people he’s come into contact with. But when it comes down to it, he doesn’t expect that loyalty to be on their side, or for the trust to run both ways. Thus, while he likes some people, his attachment to them doesn’t go much beyond that. He’s been screwed over more times than he can count, and has conducted a fair bit of payback in the process when it became necessary.

“I’m gonna try one more number,” he says. It’s a long shot, but if he can get it, it could potentially answer a lot of questions.

“What?”

Arthur glances quickly at Eames. “Saito himself.”

He pulls in a few favors and ends up with Saito’s number. He calls, and five minutes later he hangs up more confused than before. Something hums just under his skin, excitement or disbelief, he can’t quite be sure. But he feels jittery, on the verge of something. He reaches for his die in his pocket, feels its weight in his hand before he turns to Eames.

“What?” Eames says.

“Have you ever heard of a kitsune?”

Eames folds the paper up, places it on his lap. When Arthur looks at him, his hands are folded over his knees and his attention’s fully on Arthur.

“I know them quite well.”

“Trickster, right? Japanese mythology.”

Eames grins, like he’s pleased Arthur knows what a kitsune is at all. “I’m glad you didn’t neglect your myths. Though ‘trickster’ doesn’t begin to cover it. They could teach lessons, often through communication via dreams.” He lifts an eyebrow. “Something we should be able to appreciate, considering what we do.”

“Apparently Saito can appreciate that too, because he claims that’s what prompted him to dissolve his empire.”

Eames stares at him before he breaks into a grin. “Really?” He sounds delighted, amused. “Mr. Saito said that?”

“He’s gone mental,” Arthur mumbles.

Eames hums. “I wouldn’t say that. With everything going on lately, this looks like one more thing to add to the ‘People Affected’ list.”

“What if someone just… incepted him to believe it was a kitsune or whatever?”

Eames shrugs. “Sounds plausible. But I’m sure we would’ve heard something if another team had performed inception. Neither of us has. Plus, I imagine Saito has enough militarization in place to prevent that from happening, based on what I heard about his test he ran you through for his ‘interview’ before he hired you to work on Fischer.”

“So you think Saito’s ramblings are true?”

“Saito’s a smart man.” He points to the paper. “He still sounds aware and in his right mind from the interviews in the paper. Man found a way to walk into other people’s dreams less than ten years ago, Arthur. Who’s to say there isn’t stranger stuff out there?” He dips his head, makes sure Arthur’s looking in his eye. “You saw Mal yesterday? I hate to break it to you, Arthur, but she died over a year ago.”

“She’s not a mythological creature, Eames. Just…”

“A zombie? A shade? A doppelganger? I don’t know what she is, but she’s not human. Yusuf’s seeing demonic beings, Miles-who-isn’t-Miles is calling you for favors, and now Saito is claiming his misfortune is caused by a kitsune. You tell me what that all points to.”

“Fuck all if I know,” Arthur says. He sinks back into the bench, rubbing his temple.

Eames makes a soft sound next to him, cups a hand over his shoulder. “You will.” He sounds unshakably sure. Arthur looks at him sideways. “You’ll figure it out.”

“ _We’ll_ figure it out? You better not skip off mid job.”

“No, Arthur. I’m not.” He squeezes Arthur’s shoulder softly, and Arthur leans into it. “Wouldn’t imagine it. I’m here till the end.”  

\-- 

The rest of the afternoon passes quickly. Before a quick dinner, Arthur makes a few calls, finds out that Fischer remains unchanged. He’s living life, running a small portion of what’s left of his business. By all personal accounts he appears happy, healthy, in good spirits. It makes sense, according to Eames. Fischer had no part in inception except as the mark, the victim. Arthur reluctantly agrees that Eames seems to be right; Whatever’s going on seems to be affecting those that did something to Fischer, teaching the team members affected some sort of lesson. Fischer already learned a lesson of sorts when inception was performed on him. The only people unaffected remain Eames and himself, if he can ignore the possibility that he’s started dreaming again.

“Maybe we should start searching for leads on Browning or those close to Fischer,” Arthur says. He’s leading Eames to the hospital. Night’s settled in, but he wants to check up on Ariadne before the day’s out. “See if they have anything to do with this.”

Eames shrugs. Arthur can feel his shoulder move against his, he’s walking so close. “If you want. Though I don’t know how capable they are. They might be militarized, have enough brains to do that. But I don’t think they’d be able to coordinate a mass attack like this within members of the dreamshare community we know. That still doesn’t explain Mal in any case.”

Arthur sighs. Eames is right. Something is making the members of the Fischer team see and hear things, and raising people from the dead to boot, for a supposedly just cause. Arthur just wants to figure it all out before he or Eames starts showing any symptoms.

Plus, regardless of the doubt he shows Eames, Saito’s claim that a supernatural being caused him to split up his empire is making him nervous. Like there’s an entirely different aspect to this thing he couldn’t imagine before. He wants to catch it before it catches him or Eames off guard.

“You’re moving unnaturally fast in this case,” Eames tells him as they enter the hospital. Visiting hours are over in half an hour, but the nurse working for Miles is on staff. Once they get in, she’s said they can stay for another hour if need be. “Don’t you think you should rest before you collapse?”

Arthur shoots him a look. “I thought you knew me better than that?”

Eames huffs. “I know you have your limits of what you’ll do. You work hard, rest hard. I just think it’s about time you took a rest.”

Arthur keeps his eyes focused on the room numbers and pushes away Eames’s concern.

“Half an hour,” he says. “Just to see how she is. Maybe a quick session with the PASIV. Ariadne isn’t our enemy or our mark. Going under should be relatively risk free since we shouldn’t trigger any defenses in her subconscious.”  

“Unless the people who went under with her planted something in her mind and we _are_ the enemy now.”

Arthur almost pauses, but catches sight of Ariadne’s room down the hall and keeps moving.

“It’s a risk we’ll have to take at some point. Why not now.”

“That doesn’t exactly make me more confident about going into her subconscious at the moment.”

“You won’t have to. I’m going under alone the first time.”

“Wait a minute—”

The rest of Eames’s words are cut off as Arthur enters Ariadne’s room. He starts closing the door behind him so Eames has to stop talking and hurry to get into the room before the door closes. It earns Arthur a glare, but Eames doesn’t pick up his protest after that.

Ariadne is motionless in the hospital bed. If it weren’t for the hospital gown or the beeps of the heart monitor, the IV line, Arthur would’ve thought she was simply asleep.

“She looks fine to me,” Eames says.  

Arthur looks over at Eames. His hands are in his pockets, his posture at ease and relaxed. But the look he shoots Arthur is half a warning, and when Arthur looks close enough he sees his shoulders are tense beneath his jacket.

“Come on.” He grabs Eames’s elbow and pulls him closer to Ariadne.

They check her vitals, Eames checks her charts, but nothing they can see signals anything would be wrong with her, except the fact that she’s sleeping and can’t wake up.

Arthur’s never spent less than three days prepping for even the simplest job. He knows to go in with all the information he can find. It ensures that should he need to make a quick plan of escape, the plan won’t be faulty. But nothing about the past few days’ events are sitting right with him, and nothing about them is normal. There’s no paper trail to follow, no solid facts he can double check. Whatever answers they might find are going to be in Ariadne’s mind, or with Ariadne when she wakes up. And according to her chart, there have been no changes to indicate that she’s going to wake up any time soon.

“We need to go under,” he says. It’s the fastest way he can get to the bottom of what’s going on, maybe even the only way. 

“Arthur.”

Arthur looks up at Eames’s sharp tone, surprised to hear it.

“We’ve barely been on this case for a day. Give it a night’s sleep before you go jumping headfirst into someone’s comatose subconscious.”

Arthur looks Eames up and down. He seems oddly unsettled, tense. “Is there anything we haven’t checked and checked again?”

Eames’s gaze shifts away for a moment. “No.”

Arthur goes to the nightstand by Ariadne’s bed and clears it of the empty water pitcher and cup that rest there.

“Then we’re not going to get anything we can work with unless we go under. We don’t have another choice.” He puts the PASIV on the nightstand, starts unlocking it and setting it up, checking the Somnacin and lines. “Lock the door.”

Eames curses under his breath, but after a moment he follows Arthur’s orders. And soon Arthur’s settled in a hospital chair, disinfecting his skin and prepping a needle.

“And you expect me to sit this one out,” Eames says, taking a chair to Arthur’s left.

“Someone has to watch my back.”

Eames shakes his head, but he checks the PASIV over anyway. When he's done, he looks at his watch to mark time and scans the room over before focusing on Arthur again.

“Nothing I say is going to dissuade you,” he says. It’s not a question. Arthur shakes his head anyway. “You’re bloody insane.”

“Helps a little, when you can’t get answers.”

“Just be careful, yeah?”

Arthur smiles, can’t help it as he looks over at Eames. He’s watching him closely, watchful. “I got it, Mr. Eames. Your concern is noted.”

Eames shakes his head, but the last thing Arthur sees as he pushes the button to send him to sleep is Eames smiling just slightly, the emotion a contrast to the frustration that still lines the stiff hold of his shoulders and propels the sharp jab of his finger to the plunger to administer the Somnacin. Then Arthur’s asleep.

\--

Arthur wakes in pitch-black space. He’s standing on something; he can feel soft, giving ground beneath his shoes. But everything else is a disorienting void.

He reaches out both arms, feels around him in a circle. Nothing. He listens, but there’s silence except for his own slow, measured breaths in, out. His pulse beats a slow rhythm. The silence is so heavy he can _hear_ his pulse, a soft whoosh under his skin, in his ears.

After a moment trying to gauge his surroundings and coming up with nothing, he conjures a book of matches. Lights one. The light is intense in the blackness and he squints against the glow. But after one breath, two, the light dies down. Arthur looks at the flame, doesn’t have to squint anymore to see it. It’s dying in his hand. The edge of the flame reaches out in an attempt to illuminate the blackness. But all it succeeds in doing is lightening the area around it to a dull, chalky dark that reveals nothing. Where the flame should be dispersing the dark, it only seems to make room temporarily before more blackness can rise up and take its place.

The flame licks down the small wooden match, and Arthur feels the agonizing bite of the flame against his knuckle. He curses, shakes the flame out, and stills at the pitch-black that rises over him. And for the length of a few heartbeats he’s frozen in sudden terror at the sheer impenetrability of it. It seems like a being all itself, the darkness.

He tries to adjust the environment to no avail. He can’t alter anything in the dream except his own motions and being. It’s unlike anything he’s ever seen in the dreamspace, not since they first started working on the PASIV.

Arthur tries to shake that thought away. There has to be something down here, something to give him answers. He begins walking, keeping his arms out at his side and to his front to give him balance on the unsteady ground as well as to prevent him from bumping into anything should something lie in his path.

But there’s nothing. And soon he begins to lose track of time. Time is warped in dreams, but Arthur’s been under enough times that he’s learned how to gauge time in dreams just as he can when he’s awake. But this is different. Maybe it’s the complete, disorienting dark. But pretty soon he can’t tell if he’s been under for ten minutes or ten hours. He keeps listening, waiting to hear the strains of Piaf to kick him out, but nothing comes.

He blinks to remind his body his eyes aren’t closed after all, that it is really that dark here. And time ticks by, getting longer and longer.

Panic sets in after a while, and he wonders if this isn’t Ariadne’s coma. That the darkness is her mind, and that the sheer lack of anything has pulled him in, created a new sense of reality that will keep him here. If a kick came, he wonders if he’d even feel it.

He paws at his pocket, trying to keep his fingers steady as he searches for his totem. It keeps slipping out of his grasp, falling farther than he thinks his pocket goes until he makes a sudden, jerky grab for it, feels his fingers close around the cube. It feels odd, dry, tiny snags in the surface. He breathes an audible sigh of relief until he recognizes the touch of it, the same as the bone totem in his dream from the car. He can’t see it, not in this void, but he swipes his thumb over the surface and feels as if he’s running his touch against his own bone.

He drops his totem, feels it fall against his leg, and doesn’t touch it again.

He continues to walk even when the air starts catching in his lungs. It’s hot now, the air heavy, but he continues on. Everything is the same, and he’s starting to feel a sense of claustrophobia, like invisible, heavy walls are closing in on him.

Arthur rarely admits defeat, but he’s started to wonder if Ariadne is a lost cause. If whoever went under with her last time didn’t screw her up, left a young woman an empty husk. If he’s not just wasting his time and Eames’s, putting them in danger by sifting around the darkness down here and not looking for answers elsewhere, wasting time until he or Eames fall prey to whatever is going on. If it were possible for a compound to burn a person’s mind out of their body, he thinks this might be what it looks like.

He waits it out, tries to detect anything that will convince him that Ariadne is still in here somewhere.

After a while he hears something in the distance. It doesn’t register at first. It’s faint, intermittent, but then it moves closer, just off to his left, and he stops and turns. It sounds like the scrabbling of tiny claws over wooden ground. Like rats in walls. He reaches out, cautious, and there's a sudden swell, like something is running away from his touch. He yanks his arm away, and holds it close to his body as he forces himself to move onward. 

He walks faster, keeps his gaze down and tries to block the sound out. He feels trapped; the sound gets louder, moves closer, and seems to morph and coalesce until Arthur hears just one thing moving in the dark. He takes another step, and his heartbeat ratchets up into his throat when the only sound he can hear comes from right behind him, claws walking in step with his own footfalls. Every step he takes, the sound follows suit, keeping pace behind him.

Something is down here with him, and he doesn’t stop to inspect what it might be. It could be a projection, should be. But whatever it is feels different than other projections Arthur’s encountered in dreams.  It almost seems like there’s an actual consciousness to the thing following him.

He feels as if he makes a sound, he’s done for, but he came down here for a purpose.

“Ariadne?” he calls. His voice is muted, both by fear and the dark.

A soft chuckle answers, the same rolling thunder sound as the voice in the darkness from his dream. He feels something like a hand brush down the nape of his neck, and he drops, rolls out of reach.

The world turns around him, and he’s lost in the darkness. When everything stills, his back is resting against something solid, something dark. He hesitates, holds his hand in midair before he can set it down on the surface behind him. It feels like stone, but warm and wet to the touch.

He blinks, realizes it’s somehow a little lighter now. He looks to his right, and feels nauseous. Rising up around him are stonewalls. They rise up and up, the tops swallowed by ruddy darkness. He’s seen them before; they’re the same size and type of stone in Eames’s drawing, standing sentinel behind Yusuf’s demons. 

Something shifts to his left and he jerks his head around, hand reaching for a Glock at his hip that isn’t there.

There are shadows against the wall, about twenty paces away. One stands tall, slim, and Arthur almost calls out when he recognizes the form distantly. It's an impression of Ariadne in the dark. But when he opens his mouth the shadow darts away, speeding faster than he can keep track of. He hears the thud of sneakers against dirt, fading until they’re gone.

One shadow remains, hovering, waiting. Arthur feels eyes on him, feels bile rising in his throat as he recognizes the outline from Yusuf’s drawing as well. It's the uneven outline of a crouching body, the distinct shape of the head. As he watches, eyes form in the darkness, two red orbs.

When the shadow crouches on all fours, a screams starts to build in Arthur’s throat. But nothing happens, except the figure slinks forward, grows larger, and while the world fades to black again, its red eyes only intensify. He can hear claws scraping the ground, moving closer in time with the creature. Arthur presses back, scrambling to rise, but a hand darts out, catches his ankle, and when he falls back, despite the terror overwhelming him, he could swear he feels fur, like that of a fox, against his skin.

\--

He comes out of the dream with a gasp.

“Hey, hey. You’re alright.” Eames’s voice pulls him out, and Arthur feels a hand clap down over his shoulder, steadying his flailing as his chair tips backward. “Steady there.”

Arthur blinks at him, disoriented. For just a moment he lets himself feel Eames’s hand on his shoulder, lets himself sink into the solid feel of it. He shakes his leg, tries to rid it of the phantom grip, the brush of fur.

“Okay?” Eames asks.

“Yeah,” Arthur says after a moment. “Fine.” But Eames doesn’t release him right away.  “Maybe,” he adds a moment later.

Eames’s grip tightens. “What did you see?”

Arthur shakes his head. He sits up slowly, reaches to take the IV out of his vein, but Eames’s hand slides off his shoulder and beats him to it. Arthur watches the needle slide of out his arm. A small drop of blood beads on his skin before Eames presses a cloth to it, hiding it from view.

“We are so screwed,” he says at last.

Eames looks up, grip still gentle on Arthur’s arm.

“Is she gone?”

“No. I mean… I don’t know. I saw… someone down there. Something? I might’ve seen Ariadne, but…” he stops, shivers. Feels the grip on his ankle again.

“Alright.” Eames stands suddenly. “Take a moment, Arthur.” And that’s it. Arthur looks up and watches as he packs away the PASIV, wipes the room down of fingerprints and evidence that they’ve been there. He sets the water pitcher and cup down in the exact places they were before Arthur moved them, waves Arthur up when he’s sure he can stand and moves the chairs back into their positions as well. He keeps shooting Arthur small glances, and when they leave he places his hand on the small of his back, leading him through the hallways.

When they get to the car, Arthur waves Eames away and reaches out to open the car door. Pain shoots through his hand as soon as he grips the door handle and he hisses, shakes his hand before lifting it to see what caused the pain.

Eames stops mid-step, halfway around the car. “Arthur?”

Arthur doesn’t respond. He stares down at the red burn on his knuckle. The burn is small, round, about the size of a single flame of a matchstick. 


	2. Chapter 2

The drive to Eames’s flat isn’t a long one. Most of the more affluent Parisian suburbs are located less than ten miles from the city center, and judging by the length of time it takes Eames to drive to his apartment, and the southern direction they head in, Arthur assumes that’s where he’s set up a safe house. The drive allows Arthur time to collect himself. Eames stops halfway to his apartment to pick up some food, just small items: bread, some cheese, meat, and wine he shoves into Arthur’s hands as he slides back behind the wheel. Arthur cracks a smile at that, bolstered, and tells Eames what he saw in Ariadne’s subconscious. He rubs the burn on his hand almost obsessively until Eames grabs his hand from his lap and holds it on the stick shift, shifts gears with their joined grasp. He keeps quiet and still, letting Arthur speak as he will. 

The apartment is in one of the older sections of town, the sidewalks still cobbled even though the main street is concrete. The apartment is made of old stone, and Arthur can’t help but feel like he’s stepped back in time a little bit. Even in the dark, with shadows thrown onto the building making the small, dark windows appear larger and more dominating, almost eerie, Arthur can’t help but look and admire.

“I was wondering if you’d fall prey to old world charm.” 

Eames’s voice brings him out of his observation. He’s looking up from unlocking the front door, hands still working at the locks. His hands are steady, his tone light, meant to put Arthur at ease. Arthur lets himself be reassured by it and allows himself a moment to pretend not much is wrong, tries to believe in Eames’s tone and push the pain in his hand to the back of his mind.

“I may not be an architect, but I can admire a job well done,” he says.

Eames chuckles. The locks give way and he pushes open the door. Arthur hears an alarm go off as Eames disappears inside to disable it. But once in, the alarm off, Eames listens for a moment, checking all is silent and still. Assured, he leads Arthur up a large staircase into his flat proper.

There’s a distinct change as Arthur steps up from the stairs onto the main landing. It feels heavier in here, closer. He looks around the black interior illuminated only by the light from the streetlamps outside and the quarter moon.

Despite the subtle charm of the outside of the building, Eames’s house is surprisingly Spartan. The furniture is old, but in good shape. Everything has an earthy feel, and Arthur discards his shoes and bags by the front door so he can walk across the plush shag area rug that spans the length of the living room.

“Cozy,” he says, and Eames tosses him a small smile over his shoulder.

Eames starts flipping on switches, slowly bringing into relief the main room. Arthur watches. Even though lights are flicking on, the room is still dark and subdued. The walls have been painted a charcoal grey and, despite the medium size of the room, they seem to be closing in. If Arthur wanted to put a name to the feel of the room, he’d be tempted to say it felt like a rather small, closed-in cave.

Arthur starts checking the windows and doorways, cataloguing the safe spaces in the flat. Something in the dark catches his eye though, and he abandons his task to take a few steps closer. What he sees makes him stop dead, heart beating once, hard, sending a pulse throughout his body.

Eames has been forging art since before Arthur met him, way back before dreamshare technology was anything but a test tube subject. Arthur’s reminded of that as his attention is drawn away from the dimly illuminated sofas and rough wood coffee table. On the wall opposite the entrance is a canvas, splotched with dark reds and blacks and oranges. Streaks of paint slash across the canvas, and even though it’s made of paint and what looks like fabric, Arthur can’t help feel slightly uncomfortable as he steps up to the painting and examines it.

His attention is immediately drawn to the middle of the painting, and Arthur leans forward. And there, in the black swirls, are two familiar red eyes staring back at him.

“Like what you see?”

Arthur stumbles back. His shoulder rams into Eames’s chest and he grunts. He feels Eames’s hand brush against his hip to steady him, and he turns abruptly from the painting.

Eames has an eyebrow raised. There’s a somewhat expectant and—if Arthur’s correct— pleased smile on his face. His hand still rests warm over Arthur’s hip.

“One of yours?” Arthur asks instead of replying. He takes a side step back from the painting, disturbed by the image and feeling off-kilter again. He can’t help but feel the eyes are staring at him still, have followed him up from Ariadne’s subconscious. He looks over his shoulder to make sure he and Eames are the only ones in the room.

Eames hums, a disjointed sound from the on-edge feeling that’s settled over Arthur. “Yes. Painted it a while ago. Couldn’t seem to let the image go.”

Arthur nods. “Have you seen it before?”

“Had to see it to paint it, didn’t I?”

“I mean…” Arthur frowns. “Not in a painter’s visionary way. Have you _actually_ seen it?”

Eames pauses before he answers. Arthur can see him debating what words to use.

“I suppose. In a dream or the like before.”

Arthur feels something like resignation settle into his bones, drawing him in on himself. Exhaustion settles over him again, thick and heavy.

“This is what you saw in Ariadne’s subconscious, isn’t it,” Eames says, eyes still on Arthur.

Arthur nods. “Looks like something’s out there then. Making us see this.”

“Or causing it.” The words are soft, but Arthur hears him. He can’t even protest that now; it’s as likely a reason now as anything is.

“You still aren’t experiencing anything weird?” Arthur says. Exhaustion is heightening his fear, and he looks Eames over for any sign that he’s starting to show symptoms. But Eames just shakes his head.

“You, on the other hand, look like death.” It’s meant as a joke, Arthur can tell, but it suddenly seems like a real possibility instead of a figure of speech. Eames seems to recognize that too, because he rubs at the back of his neck before saying, “Get some sleep before we figure out what to do next, yeah?”

“No.”

Arthur’s voice comes out harsher than he means. Almost panicked. Eames’s eyebrows shoot up in surprise, and he looks at Arthur, waits until Arthur shakes his head.

“I’ve seen those eyes somewhere else too,” he admits. “In the car. On the way from the airport. I must’ve… fallen asleep or something. Thought I relived a memory, but… it couldn’t have been.” He gestures vaguely at the painting. “Saw those. You were there.”

Eames’s expression doesn’t change. “You’re dreaming again?”

“I don’t know.” It’s the truth. At least until he falls asleep and dreams and confirms his suspicions.

Eames sighs. “Alright. At least…” he looks around the flat. “I’ll show you to your room. At least rest, get cleaned up.”

Arthur is about to protest again, but then Eames steps close and Arthur feels his warmth radiate along his entire front. It stops his words, makes his throat tight and his eyes heavy. He wants to step forward, close the distance between them, and let his eyes slide shut and allow whatever might happen to simply happen. He thinks, maybe, if he fell asleep here, that he could fall asleep without dreaming, without nightmares following him down. Arthur doesn’t think like that, not ever, but right now it seems completely possible.

“Alright,” he says after a moment. Eames nods, steps away briefly to get Arthur’s bag. When he comes back he closes a hand around Arthur’s wrist, and Arthur lets Eames lead him away from the painting.

There are two hallways leading off of Eames’s living room, both dark sentinels on either side of the small kitchen. Arthur looks to the left one, the right, and after a moment heads towards the left, not sure why he chooses it.

Eames makes a soft sound and tightens his hold on him. “Not that way, quite yet. The master’s a mess.”

Arthur looks back at him, lifts an eyebrow. He’s tired. But he and Eames have shared enough beds in countless hotel rooms that the sudden separation of space has him shocked.

“I said it’s a mess,” Eames says after a moment. “That’s all. The guest room’s big enough for two, and more suited to your tastes at the moment.”

Arthur hums doubt, but lets Eames pull him in the opposite direction.

“I’ll give you the grand tour tomorrow,” Eames says. “After we figure everything out. You’ll be more awake, and appreciate it more.” He sounds certain, like Arthur should understand something he’s implying. It sounds like a promise, but Arthur shoves the tone away, too tired and worried and off-kilter still to worry much about it.

The walls of the hallway are still closed in, still the same dark charcoal gray as the living room. But away from the paintings it feels a little lighter, more open despite the narrowing space.

The guest room is small, but the bed is a queen and the comforter looks clean, the pillows soft. Eames places Arthur’s bag at the foot of the bed before he disappears into the en suite. Arthur watches him pull a towel down from a linen closet just inside the bathroom door.

“How long has it been since you’ve been here?” he asks. He can’t see dust on the floor or on the nightstand. The linen smells fresh.

“Since we started working together proper,” Eames says. “So what, six months now?”

He comes back, places the towel on the bed before looking Arthur over.

“Clean up. Unwind for a bit,” he says. “I’ll have food ready when you get out if you still don’t feel like sleep.”

As he leaves he brushes Arthur’s shoulder with his own. Arthur huffs, shoves back against him a little, ends up lifting a hand to push Eames out of the room with a touch that’s more of a reassuring caress than a shove. Eames grunts, Arthur can hear the amusement in it, and then the door closes and Arthur’s alone.

Arthur stands still for a moment and listens to Eames walk away, his footfalls even until he reaches the kitchenette. The sounds of him putting food away, the wrinkling of a bag, the opening and closing of a refrigerator. The noise fades after a while and Arthur hears Eames walk farther away, the opening and closing of a bedroom door. Arthur shakes his head, and starts looking around his room.  

He looks in the corners of the room, the windows latches, the room’s armoire and the linen closet. He hesitates before going into the living room again and checking the corners there too. He avoids looking at the painting, and despite multiple checks around the room, out the windows, making sure the blinds are drawn tightly over them, he still feels a strange sensation of being watched. He checks his totem three times, makes sure it’s still red acrylic, white dots notched into the surface.

He stands for a moment at the entrance to the hallway leading to the master bedroom. He’d be within his rights if he checked that out too. To makes sure the residence was secure. But the hallway is pitch black. He can’t see more than four feet down it before it’s obscured in darkness. He sees something, though, a darker blackness lining the hall on either side. Feels something looming just out of sight.

The sound of running water breaks his concentration and he jumps. He hears Eames’s soft shuffling as he moves around the master bedroom, the sound of a bottle falling into the shower. He looks around the hallway again, feels the heaviness has dissipated. He remembers Eames’s promise to show him the rest of the apartment tomorrow and reminds himself that he trusts Eames enough that he feels secure without checking the entire place over himself. It’s been enough in the past. It should be enough now. Especially in a place Eames calls his home.

Arthur rubs his wrist, feels Eames’s phantom grip around him. He turns, goes back to the guest room, turns on the shower, and tries to wake himself up and dispel any lingering worry, any sensation of being observed, with scalding water.

\--

By the time he comes out of the shower, his mind clearer and emotions tapped down, Eames has emerged from his room. He’s changed as well, and when he passes by Arthur, handing him a cup of coffee and a plate with half a loaf of bread and assorted meats and cheeses on it, Arthur catches a whiff of cologne or body wash. He allows himself a breath, feels somehow lighter, before thanking Eames and taking a seat at the kitchen island.

Eames waves the thanks away and pops a piece of sausage into his mouth. He looks Arthur over, seems to approve of his newly refreshed state, because he smiles slightly.

“Now that you’re feeling better, where do we go from here?”

Arthur sighs. Takes a moment to chew some bread and cheese. He doesn’t know what kind it is, but it’s good. He savors it, lets himself just breathe for a moment.

“I have no idea,” he finally says.

Eames sighs in front of him. When he moves a moment later, he reaches into a drawer, pulls out a corkscrew, and opens the bottle of wine he purchased. He pours two glasses, slides one in place of Arthur’s coffee, and lifts his own in a mock salute.

Arthur reaches out, returns the gesture, and drinks.

\--

An hour later Arthur is lounging on Eames’s couch. He made sure the painting is at his back, tries to tell himself the uncomfortable watched feeling he can’t shake is just the exhaustion settling over him in a strange way, the otherworldly circumstances of the past few days inhabiting the odd, overactive portions of his brain.

Eames is a warm presence pressed against his side. His legs are outstretched, feet resting on his coffee table, and Arthur lets him settle his knee slightly over Arthur’s leg.

“You really aren’t feeling anything odd?” Arthur asks. He can feel the wine settling into his veins, warm, making his lips tingle slightly.

“You keep asking that,” Eames says. He takes the wine glass from Arthur’s fingers, takes a sip. “I didn’t know you were so concerned about me.”

Arthur shift, turns to look at him. “Cobb’s being stalked by his dead wife. Yusuf sees demons, which just so happen to be in Ariadne’s dreams. Dreams in her subconscious mind that she can’t wake up from. Saito’s life has been ruined by a mythological creature, which I also might’ve witnessed in Ariadne’s dreams. It’s all connected. I’ve started to dream. I think. Sorry if I’m a little concerned.”

Eames grins. And Arthur doesn’t understand why.

“How charming, Arthur. I didn’t know you cared so much.”

Arthur turns away, is about to get up, but finds himself remaining stationary and shaking his head instead.

“If I wasn’t so concerned about the last remaining members of the Fischer team, the only team that seems affected, why would I even be here, trying to figure this out?”

“The two remaining members being you and me,” Eames says. Arthur shoves at Eames a little when he sees Eames still smiling out of the corner of his eye. “Arthur,” Eames almost purrs, and Arthur shakes his head but can’t help but settle a little more into the couch when Eames slides an arm around his shoulders and moves in closer.

“You’re concerned about me,” Arthur says, hating the wine loosening his tongue. “It’s only right I return the favor.”

“Of course,” Eames says. He sounds serious, but he’s moving Arthur around, easy as can be, and Arthur feels him smile against his cheek. “Like begets like, and all that.”

Arthur snorts, lets himself sink into the moment instead of worrying about whether Eames will start experiencing symptoms or not. Tells himself it’s only the wine that makes him clutch Eames close, makes his grip a little too tight, a little too urgent. It’s the worry, that’s it, that lets Arthur make room in his space for Eames, like it’s Eames’s own to claim.

\--

Arthur switches to coffee after that. Tries to shift into business mode again. It’s hard to drag himself off the couch, away from Eames’s warmth, but he moves to the kitchen island, turns on his laptop to make a few more inquiries and see if anything new has popped up. A few members of dreamshare are starting to disappear, take a leave of absence of a sort, and Arthur sees the same symptoms popping up in other people, other dreamers. It’s subtle, only a few, but Arthur sees a small pattern developing.

“It’s like all the dreamers are being scared away from dreamshare,” he mumbles to himself.

Eames looks over Arthur’s shoulder. “Only a few?”

Arthur nods. “But… people we’ve worked with recently. Guess you were right when you mentioned a strange virus. We’ll have to see if it spreads more.”

Eames nods and grabs the files Miles gave them. He moves to the seat beside Arthur and looks through them as Arthur continues to do research. A new sense of urgency has started seeping into his bones.

“We go under with Ariadne tomorrow,” he says.

Eames nods. “Seems best. Doesn’t sound like anything we can’t handle.”

That’s not true, and Arthur’s sure they both know that by now. But he feels better, knowing that Eames will be under with him. And they have to figure out what’s going on. There’s no way around it.

“Plus, it’s about time we learned the truth,” Eames adds a moment later.

Arthur huffs in amusement at Eames’s choice of words. “Suddenly invested?”

“I was invested the moment you invited me along on this romp.”

“You invited yourself along,” Arthur points out.

Eames looks up at that. “We’ve been working together for a while. I thought it was clear I’d work with you whenever.”

Arthur stills at that. Looks Eames over. It’s true. They’ve been working together exclusively for months. And Arthur prefers it. Won’t deny the fact that he’s worked with Eames more than he ever worked with Cobb, and more closely. Eames is—always has been—brilliant. Arthur knew that when he first met him in Project Somnacin. He’d only been reassured and reminded of it as the years went by. Where Cobb burned bright and brilliant, only to fall in the wake of his own curiosity, Eames burns steady, only seems to increase in strength with time instead of failing.

Arthur knows that as long as Eames wants to continue working with him, he’ll be happy to work alongside him. In dreamshare, amongst other things. He’s started to expect the same of Eames, and Eames’s words are his proof.

“Glad to hear it,” Arthur says, tries for nonchalance, but he sees Eames’s knowing smirk and knows he failed.

“You know,” he can’t help press after a moment. “There was a time I wasn’t quite sure you would work with me. In fact, you didn’t. Not for a long time.”

“For about a year, you mean,” Eames says. “After Mal died until after we pulled off inception.”

Arthur grunts, feels an irrational frustration rise up. “Exactly.”

“I thought your loyalties were split then. And no man can be loyal to three men.”

Arthur looks up, confused.

“Yourself, Cobb, and me,” Eames clarifies. He even lifts a hand to count them on his fingers. One, two, three.

Arthur doesn’t try to hide his shock. “I don’t owe anyone anything. Least of all loyalty. You included.”

“I know. Doesn’t mean the loyalty’s not there,” Eames says. “I’ve seen people, in and out of dreamshare, screw each other over again and again. No one seems loyal anymore. I thought you were different— _knew_ you were different—but I forgot that when you ran after Cobb to help him. I didn’t see until the Fischer job that you wouldn’t screw me over. I’d forgotten that, until then.”

Arthur feels his heart beating a heavy, quickened rhythm against his chest.

“You saw that, did you." 

“Mhmm,” Eames hums. He looks back down to the papers, nonchalantly flicking through them. Arthur stares at him.

“If it settles you any,” Eames says after a moment, lifting his gaze to Arthur again and observing his reaction, “you’ve noticed already that I tend not to work with anyone too often, too soon after a job. I don’t trust people. Not even a little." 

“But you work with me.”

“I wonder what that could mean, then,” Eames says. He reaches over, wraps a hand around Arthur’s coffee, and takes a drink. Arthur watches him the entire time, letting that sink in even as he reaches and takes back his mug from Eames’s grip.

“You didn’t even like me,” Arthur says after a long moment. “When we stopped working together. After Mal, before the Fischer job.”

“Oh, I did. I just didn’t think I could trust you."

“And then you could?”

Eames looks Arthur over, and Arthur feels something in him sink deep. Feels oddly settled as a kind of reciprocation to what Eames is explaining settles into his bones.

“I saw your shock when Cobb told us about Limbo,” Eames says. “That our brains would turn to scrambled egg if we made one wrong step. You were just as shocked as the rest of us. You had no idea. Cobb had screwed you over just as crudely as he did the rest of us, and I knew you didn’t—couldn’t—follow him down that path. I saw, too, Ariadne following Cobb, prying into his secrets. She saw and discovered something about him that you didn’t want to see, didn’t want any part of. You were still the Arthur I knew in Project Somnacin, and the years after.”

“And… what? We were suddenly on the same side again?”

Eames’s grin is affirmation enough, but he answers anyway. “We’ve always been on the same side,” he says. “It just took you a while to remember that.”

Arthur lifts his chin. “Or maybe you just had to do the remembering.”

Eames looks at him a moment, gaze focused, intense. His smile softens.

“You’re quite right,” he says. “But I remember now.”

\--

It’s almost morning by the time Eames reaches out, taps at the side of Arthur’s computer.

“I think you’ve exhausted your resources for tonight,” he says. “Bed. Or you’ll be no use at all to me tomorrow.”

Arthur grunts in protest, holding his hand up to stop Eames from closing his laptop. But he saves his searches, sends out one more email, before shutting down and standing up.

Eames hovers by the kitchen table. Arthur feels something like expectation, and he looks up to see Eames watching him again. Things seem changed between them. They’ve both shown their hands to each other, uncovered something they didn’t talk about before, not even when they worked together after Project Somnacin, were as close as they’d ever been before now. Arthur doesn’t know whether to step closer to Eames, or give him space.

Then Eames speaks. “I can take the master,” he says. “If you’d rest easier.”

And that answers it for Arthur. Nothing’s changed, so much as confirmed. They’re working a job, a job that has him exhausted, at a lost for answers. And underneath it all, he’s worried. Worried to go to sleep and discover he’s dreaming for real, worried to have that certainty settle bone deep. Worried that he’ll wake up and Eames will be seeing demons, or go under with the PASIV tomorrow and not wake up at all.

“I wouldn’t,” he says. He walks up to Eames, backs him up against the table, and kisses him.

Eames grunts in surprise. It takes him a moment, but then his palms close over Arthur’s hips and he’s kissing back, sighing a little.

It feels different, somehow. After everything they’ve said. And especially now, living in Eames’s home instead of in some hotel room. Arthur doesn’t believe in romance, not really. He’s seen it go terribly wrong too many times to be sentimental or believe love is somehow built to last. But with exhaustion taking over his body and his brain again, and Eames pushing back and weaving an arm around his waist to hold him close, rub up against him a little, it feels somehow right. It feels better than romance or sentiment. Feels closer, somehow.

They don’t do much more than that. Eames eventually pulls back, backs him up down the hallway until Arthur pulls away and turns around and leads Eames to bed. In the darkness, under the covers, Arthur wavers on the edge of sleep. And for just a moment he feels as if Eames surrounds him completely. He opens his eyes, looks around, and sees all-encompassing darkness. Feels as if Eames _is_ the darkness. But Arthur is on the edge of sleep, on the edge of dream, and he blames the sensation on his mind finally succumbing to fatigue. Between the next breath and the last, he’s asleep.

\--

Arthur doesn’t realize he’s dreaming at first. He’s back on base, working on Project Somnacin. He recognizes the hallway he’s walking down, knows it’s different than any other hallway in the base by the older tile lining the walls. Only a few people know of this hallway and the room it leads to. On paper, there are only three PASIV Devices. Each is locked down tightly, checked almost obsessively. Run multiple times a day to test compounds and take practice runs.

But what Arthur and only a handful of other people know is that there are four more devices. Kept under lock and key. Arthur proved himself early on in both adeptness and skill in the dreamscape as well as his intellect topside. He was let in on the project. He knows five other names of people who are involved in the production of the other machines. Eames is one of them. They’ve worked together for over a year now. More so than any two people on the base, on and off duty.

He comes to the door at the end of the hall. The door usually requires a badge for entrance, but all he has to do is reach out, sweep his hand to the side, and the door opens. But his arm is not his own. It’s thicker, heavier.  And Arthur has a moment of dizzying disorientation when he realizes the body he’s in is not his. He takes stock, tries to figure out what’s going on, when he passes the one-way mirror used for observation set in the room’s northern wall.

Eames stares back at him. He’s in Eames’s body.

The PASIV Devices are stacked on the far wall, each in their own case, each ready to use with the past week’s inspections and trial runs.

And suddenly Arthur remembers this day. It’s a memory. But somehow he’s seeing it through Eames’s eyes instead of his own.

And sure enough, as he goes to the far wall where all the PASIV Devices rest and he reaches out to take one, he feels the cold nudge of the muzzle of a gun at the base of his skull. An emotion passes through him, foreign. It feels a lot like annoyance, but unlike the emotion as Arthur’s felt it before. The thought that flashes through his mind is even more disturbing and alien. That he’d be, for once, annoyed to leave this new body behind just when he’s formed it into something useful.

A pistol goes off, the sound ricocheting off the walls. He flinches, a reaction born of this body. But instead of feeling the ragged slide of a bullet through bone and into the back of his brain, he feels the cold metal leave his skin. Something heavy hits the floor behind him.

He turns around. And Arthur remembers this. Remembers walking into the room to run a test on the PASIV Devices, remembers seeing Eames with his hands up, one of the other intelligence officers holding a gun to the back of his head, a PASIV Device already in his other hand. He shot without hesitation, on instinct, fired without even thinking about the consequences. Doesn’t remember feeling any remorse, only the surprising, bone-rattling relief when he’d seen the man fall instead of Eames.

But now he watches himself stride forward. Feels something in Eames move from vaguely curious to suddenly intrigued and… not quite grateful, but almost. Arthur watches himself step over the body lying at Eames’s feet and bend down to retrieve the gun lying next to the dead man’s grasp.

“Don’t leave your back unguarded,” Arthur says as he stands. He’s smirking, playful. Arthur remembers trying to hide the pounding of his heart, trying to blame it on killing a man instead of finding Eames at the losing end of a pistol. He holds the man’s gun out to Eames. “I’m not going to be around to guard it 24/7.”

He feels Eames’s smirk on his lips. “Come now. That wouldn’t be all bad.”

Arthur huffs, but he holds Eames’s gaze before he turns away and steps back toward the entrance. He leaves the body for Eames to clean up.

“After next week you might have to. If reassignment finds us in two different places.”

But Arthur knew back then, and Arthur feels that Eames knew too, they’d be working together again soon. The business card he’d slid into Eames’s grip along with the man’s gun proved it. Eames glances down, and Arthur sees the name and number on the business card he’d handed him that day.

“Miles Cobb?” he says, Eames’s voice humming in his own throat, working his own lips to form the words. “Is this an invitation, Arthur?”

Arthur watches himself raise an eyebrow. “Take it as you will.” But it was. He’d been reassigned to work with Miles, had wanted Eames to follow him if he could. For both work and personal reasons. And Eames knew. Arthur feels that now, knows that by the thoughts running through his own head. Feels too Eames’s spike of interest. And the thought that This. _This_ is going to be fun.

Arthur watches his body leave and close the door securely behind him.

He never asked Eames what he was doing in the room with the PASIV Devices. Not then, and not when he’d seen Eames later that day. Not even weeks later when he was working with Miles and Eames showed up one evening at his favorite coffee shop, sat down next to him like they’d planned to meet all along. And when he’d returned to the room that day, fifteen minutes later, just enough time to let Eames leave and take the body elsewhere—a penance for getting caught off-guard in the first place—, he’d found the room empty. One of the PASIV Devices had gone missing. In his report he’d blamed the disappearance on the dead man. To everyone else’s understanding, the man had gone missing. Everyone had assumed he’d taken the device and ran. Arthur’d assumed Eames did a very good job at disposing of bodies. An even better job at hiding a PASIV Device in a military base for a week before relocation and, a week later, going AWOL.

But Arthur is caught in Eames’s body now. And he holds his breath, waits to see how Eames pulled off hiding the body in a military base full of personnel and security measures.

He expects Eames to bend down, to drag the body somewhere. But instead, he feels his body start to disintegrate. There’s no other word for it. There’s a slow separation he feels all over his body, as if pieces of him are breaking off, growing smaller, floating away. And yet he still feels whole. Feels, in fact, _more_. He feels bigger, stronger, all-encompassing. On the edge of his vision he sees black mist. The lights in the room flicker and go dim.

He kneels down, opens his mouth, and before he realizes what’s happening he feels his teeth, razor-sharp, sink into flesh.

Hot blood rushes into his mouth, but whatever Arthur is, he isn’t human, doesn’t taste with a human tongue. Instead of the metallic wash of blood across his tongue, memories wash over him, human memories from this man’s life. Too fast for him to latch onto. But that doesn’t matter. Not when he feels the surprise at the moment of death seep into him from the man’s flesh. He feels strength return to his own molecules, feels his mind expand, stretch out, encompass the entire base.

He can feel every living thing in the base. Feels the thud of heartbeats kicking up in fear as men dream, veins pumped full of Somnacin. The pain of the men in the hospital ward pricks at his consciousness. He can feel the men in the debriefing room drunk on power, sure of their moves, unwilling to listen as concerns and alternatives are brought forth for them to listen to. And he soaks it all in. Grows and grows and feels stronger, fed by the flesh under his teeth, the blood dripping over his inhuman jaw, the emotions leaking from some place deeper than flesh and blood.

The body’s gone in less than a minute. And Eames stands, body human. He brushes off the front of his uniform, runs a hand through his hair, impeccable as he always was back then. He reaches forward, takes a PASIV Device from its shelf. When he leaves he passes the one-way mirror again. He looks up briefly, and Arthur sees Eames’s knowing smirk, like he’s made a point. But his eyes are deep, almost soft. Then, between one blink and the next, Eames’s eyes go from pale to red. The same eyes that stared back at him when he looked into Eames’s painting, the same eyes looming in the dark of Ariadne’s subconscious.

Something snaps in Arthur’s brain, fills his vision with red, and he feels his body break apart, disintegrate. He screams and feels himself fall.

\--

“Hey!”

Arthur’s jolted out of sleep by an arm around his waist, pulling him back from the sudden emptiness where the bed drops away.

“Arthur! Hey.”

Arthur freezes, realizes he was struggling against something. He’s breathing hard. Sweat-damp clothes stick to his body, make everything too hot, too tight. There’s soft light coming from behind the thick curtains hanging over the windows, but the room is still bathed in gray shadow.

Eames’s arm is around him, his breath warm against his shoulder.

“Alright, there?”

Arthur jumps. His elbow comes up, reflexively shooting back to push the body too close to his away. He hears the breath rush out of Eames’s lungs, hears him swear a moment later. But Arthur’s running on instinct now and jumps off the bed, turning mid-jump to face the body behind him.

Eames is holding a hand over his ribs, staring at Arthur with almost too-wide eyes. He looks at ease, but Arthur knows. Can see the tight hold he has on his body, the way his gaze darts around Arthur’s body as he looks for a weapon or a further action of some sort. He’s poised to go on the defensive.

Arthur doesn’t care. Not right now. He looks Eames over. His eyes are blue, no hint of red whatsoever. He’s in his shorts, hair rumpled from sleep, looking as normal as ever. And, after a few minutes of Arthur’s stillness, confused.

Arthur swallows. Almost gags when he tastes the remnants of a metallic tang.

“Arthur?”

Arthur takes a breath, swallows again. The taste of blood is gone.

“Sorry,” he says. His voice is hoarse.

Eames just looks at him a moment before nodding. “You are dreaming again, aren’t you.”

Arthur feels the sharp sour taste of bile at the back of his throat.

“Bloody hell, Arthur.”

Arthur watches Eames rub a hand over his face. He doesn’t move toward Arthur though, doesn’t make any sudden moves or make to comfort him, for which Arthur is grateful. Arthur breathes and adjusts, and after a few moments of trying to relax his muscles and shake off the need to run, Arthur closes the distance to the bed and climbs back in. He leaves a little space between them. If Eames notices, he doesn’t show it.

Arthur feels shaky, suddenly wants his totem in his hand. But despite the dream, the strange creature Eames had turned into, and the lingering wariness Arthur feels, he can’t help but feel worry for Eames prickle at his awareness as he looks Eames over. Eames is beside him on the bed, concern sharpening his features, and Arthur starts to wonder if whatever’s happening will affect Eames differently. If perhaps what he felt Eames turn into in his dream is hiding under his skin now. He feels foolish for even thinking it, but still...

“You’re still not experiencing anything?” he asks.

Eames shakes his head. “Not that I can say.” He pauses. Looks Arthur over. “What was it?”

Arthur doesn’t want to share. Doesn’t want to admit to the images he’s seen. Feels that by revealing it, he’s asking for something else to be revealed, as nonsensical as it sounds.

“It was just a dream,” he finds himself saying. “Or… half dream, half memory. It threw me, is all.”

Eames looks at him closely, trying to gauge his words against what he sees in Arthur’s face.

“Okay,” he says softly, and Arthur knows Eames is picking up on his unwillingness to share. “But a dream nonetheless?”

Arthur nods.

Eames says something under his breath. Arthur doesn’t quite catch it, but after a moment he pushes back the covers and stands. Arthur watches him, is about to ask him where he’s going, when he picks up Arthur’s pants from the floor, walks over to him, and drops them in his lap.

Eames doesn’t step back right away. Instead he reaches out. Arthur flinches on reflex, still caught in a weird headspace, and Eames freezes. Arthur’s heart is pounding in his chest. He’s never flinched from Eames, not ever, but right now he needs a moment. Maybe a few moments.

He thinks he sees Eames nod, and then Eames’s hand is pulling back, pulling away, and Eames is turning.

“Hey,” Arthur says. His voice catches, but he looks up and meets Eames’s gaze. Arthur doesn’t have anything else to say, not really. But Eames sees it, always sees it. He can read Arthur as easily as he can read a mark, sometimes. It should concern Arthur, but he doesn’t really care. Hasn’t cared for a while now.

So Eames reads him, waits, gives Arthur time. The next time he reaches out, Arthur closes his eyes, sighs a little when he feels Eames’s fingers comb through his hair, his hand settle warm and solid on the top of his head. Arthur lets his heartbeat slow in his chest at the familiar touch, starts to sink comfortable back into his own skin.

“I’ll get coffee,” Eames says when Arthur feels almost normal again. Arthur nods, and Eames’s hand slips away and he leaves. Arthur fishes his die out of his pants pocket. The die is solid, red with white dots, weighted just right. Arthur holds it secure in his fist, familiar edges biting into his palm, until he feels his hand start to ache with the pressure of his grip and Eames calls him in for breakfast.

\--

“So you’re dreaming now. Amongst everything else.” Eames looks up from the PASIV. “Guess it’s a good thing I decided to work this job with you after all.”

They’re in the hospital again. The midday rounds have just finished, and the nurse has told them they’ll have a full two hours before anyone else enters the room. They have more than enough time to make a few trips into Ariadne’s mind if need be.

“Either you’re immune from whatever’s going on,” Arthur says, half joking, “or this is it before you come down with something yourself. I don’t want to wait and find out what that’ll be.”

After the initial shock of the dream had worn off, he’d rallied himself, realized that even though he was dreaming again, even though some elements of the dreams seem to be following him into reality, he is okay. While the taste of blood and burns carry over from dream to reality, he’s not seeing hallucinations. At least for now. The line between reality and dreams are clearly blurring, at least for him, and yet Arthur knows this is reality. His die is still loaded correctly, is the same weight. Everything about this world is right. And yet somehow the definitions of it are altering.

Arthur supposes this must be how the first pioneers into dreamshare technology must have felt. No one could walk in dreams. It was beyond imagination until suddenly it became reality.

But still. Just because something in his perception of reality has changed, doesn’t make it risk free or without consequences. It’s quite the opposite. He keeps checking Eames, making sure he’s not looking at empty corners or looking at things oddly, like something might be there that nobody else can see. But Eames remains unaffected.

“We’ll find out soon enough,” Eames says. “Either way.”

“I guess so,” Arthur says. Eames starts to hand him the line for the PASIV, but Arthur extends his arm and lets Eames hook him up. “Ready when you are.”

Eames nods, reaches toward the button, and a moment later blackness rises up to meet him.

\--

Arthur half expects to see the same creature he’d left in Ariadne’s subconscious as soon as returns there. But when Ariadne’s subconscious rises up around him he’s just as alone as he was when he’d first gone under.

“Eames?” Arthur calls. There’s no answer. He stands still, listens, waits to hear or feel Eames around him somewhere. But after a few moments and nothing's changed, he knows he’s alone.

He walks. The darkness seems different this time, not as heavy. And after he’s been walking for only a short time the darkness starts to lift, turns into a ruddy red-black. Arthur is starkly, uncomfortably reminded of Eames’s painting, and he looks around again for the red eyes staring out of the emptiness around him. But instead of eyes, he sees dark objects start to materialize from the ground up. He hesitates before walking toward them. When he gets close he realizes the same walls Eames sketched out of graphite are rising up to meet him again. Only this time they’ve increased in number and there’s a small opening in one. He looks inside the opening, and sees the walls stretching away from him in a confusing pattern.

“It’s a maze,” he says aloud. His voice doesn’t echo; the walls are soft, wet, absorb the sound.

He squints into the faded light, disoriented by the red color and the way it makes everything look not quite solid. He’s about to turn around when he hears a sound. It resembles the fall of human shoes against wet stone.

“Eames?” he risks calling out. He’s answered by a familiar shout, and his heart jolts when the sound is more distressed than an actual answer. Arthur takes a step forward and enters the maze.

He doesn’t hear the sound again. Not Eames’s voice, and not the footsteps. He doesn’t even hear the scurrying he heard the first time. But as he walks, the air gets thicker, starts to smell metallic, like blood, and the walls have started to take on a shiny quality, like some gel-like liquid covers them. Arthur doesn’t dare touch them, doesn’t want to know what they’re covered with, even as he breathes through his mouth to try to dispel the scent of blood.

At one point the earth shakes beneath him, making him stumble, and he pitches sideways. He throws an arm out, hoping to break his fall, but when he catches himself against the wall, his hand colliding with wet stone, he jerks back, stumbling again in his haste to move away. Even in the brief moment when he’d leaned against the wall, it felt warm and moved as if it had a pulse. The wall feels alive.

He wipes his hand on his shirt, heart beating hard against his ribs. The glance down is instinctive, and he stares at the stripe of red cutting across his chest. He shakes his hand, stares in horror at the blood covering his palm, lines dripping from between his fingers down the back of his hand.

He walks for what feels like ages. He keeps an eye out for Eames, feels like calling out to him. But he’s unsure of his surroundings, wary again, and doesn’t even know if Eames would hear him if he did call out for him. So he keeps quiet and searches.

Time loses definition again, the distinction of this dream becoming hazy, and Arthur starts to become disoriented. He wants to make sure this isn’t reality, that he’s not stuck here, but he doesn’t look for his totem; he doesn’t want to feel bone in his hand.

Just when he’s about to stop walking, he hears footsteps again. He freezes, thinking it’s the scraping sound of claws from the first dream. But he listens anyway and recognition sparks through him. He opens his mouth to call out when a shadow suddenly appears, running right for him, and they collide.

He reaches out, grabs Eames’s arm, and yanks him to a stop. Eames stumbles, the ground making their movements unsteady, but the momentum sends him crashing back against Arthur’s body and Arthur wraps an arm around his waist to keep him upright. Eames’s body goes rigid against his until Arthur says his name.  

“Bloody hell, Arthur,” Eames gasps.

“Where the fuck have you been?”

Eames looks ragged, mouth pulled down into a frown, hair slightly undone. He shakes his head, and Arthur notices a streak of blood crawling down his neck.

“I don’t want to bore you with the details.” His voice is tight, short. He glances behind him quickly before turning around and dragging Arthur into another tunnel, deeper into the maze and farther from where they’ve both come. “Let’s continue, shall we?”

There’s a streak of something Arthur thinks might be claw marks across Eames’s back when he falls into step behind him. But he doesn’t ask, lets Eames pull him away from the direction he came from. He sees Eames look over his shoulder once, twice, before he seems satisfied that whatever he was running from is gone.

They walk for miles. The maze is unending, and Arthur doesn’t know where they’ve been, where they haven’t, if the walls are even stationary or leading anywhere in particular. It’s becoming harder to focus on the dream around them.

“If this ends up being a fucking Minotaur dream,” Arthur says, “Ariadne’s never going to hear the end of it.”

He’s surprised when he hears Eames chuckle at that. “How poetic, Arthur.”

“Not poetic,” he says. “Practical.” He waves an arm around the walls of the maze around him. “Ariadne would be the poet.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Eames says. He tugs on Arthur hand, and Arthur falls into step beside him.

“As long as we don’t turn out to be some sacrificial offering in this place, I’ll be satisfied,” he says.

“Wouldn’t dream of such a thing,” Eames mumbles.

Arthur glances sidelong at him, but Eames is too busy to catch his eye, see the question there, and Arthur lets it drop. The maze is already messing with them, making the world seem detached, and Arthur has to focus all his energy on remembering why he’s there, what he’s looking for, when he’s not busy listening for some creature falling into step behind them.

\--

When they find Ariadne, it seems rather poetic after all. Arthur doesn’t know definitively if they’re in the center of the maze or not. But the stonewalls are surrounding them in a large, arena-like enclosure. Ariadne is in the exact center, yarn unspooling from her outstretched arms and tied to various objects lying haphazardly at her feet.

Arthur calls out to her, has to do it twice when he can’t seem to find his voice.

Ariadne jerks at her name, but goes on staring down at her feet, arms held out at her sides, like she’s being suspended by invisible string from above even as tangible string is falling from her arms to the ground beneath her.

Something’s wrong. Arthur knows it, feels it in the way the air is hot, dripping with some form of humidity that is thicker than water. He glances at Eames, but Eames is staring at Ariadne, gaze intense, unreadable.

Arthur bolts forward, has to go slower than he’d like to keep his balance on the soft ground. When he gets closer, he’s shocked to find that the objects tied to the strings from Ariadne’s arms are photographs, notes, diagrams of dreamscapes. He reaches forward, to try to grab one, read it, see what it is, but the farther he reaches, the farther the object gets.

A soft animal grunt of pain breaks the air above him, and he looks up. Ariadne is staring at him, eyes unseeing.

“Ariadne,” he tries. He looks for a hint of recognition, some sign that his voice is even registering with her. He sees a small tremor run through her body. But that’s it. Until suddenly her arms fall, as if a string had been cut, and Arthur sees string pooling, flowing out from her, and he stares in horror as the objects grow at her feet. He thinks he sees the diagram they used for the last dream level of the Fischer job briefly before it’s buried under a pile of yarn.

“Eames!” Arthur turns, looks for him. Eames is standing a bit away, watching them. “Help me, would you?”

“What do you want me to do, Arthur?” His voice is weird. Like he’s asking Arthur something else, like he’s not in this dream at all suddenly. Arthur feels panic start to rise, but he forces it down when he feels Ariadne move behind him.

When he turns back to Ariadne, he sees that she’s moved away and is crouched on the ground. String has risen up, wrapped itself around her body. Her arms are trapped under the weight of string and paper against her sides.

But her eyes have changed. They’re aware now, wide in what looks like stark panic. Her gaze is lowered and on Eames.

Arthur steps forward, and at the same time Eames does as well. Eames seems to move faster, though, is suddenly closer, and a shrill scream pierces the air, makes Arthur clap his hands over his ears before he realizes it’s Ariadne. She’s stumbled back, tried to rise, but is caught in the web woven of string and notes, and falls.

Arthur jumps forward, catches her before she hits the ground. But just as they make contact, her skin flashes away and Arthur is holding a creature made of bone and muscle and blood. He almost cries out, feels his arms loosen their hold. But then he blinks and Ariadne is there, staring up at him, gaze moving wildly over his features.

“Arthur?” She sounds dazed, like she’s trying to drag herself back to consciousness.

Arthur almost laughs aloud in relief.

“Hey,” he says. “Nice digs.”

“What are you... You don’t belong here. You can’t see… not yet…”

“See?” he asks. “See what?” He has to poke, prod, get to the bottom of this somehow. What this is, where they are.

“My… I was looking for something…” She looks down and Arthur feels her body go rigid. She pushes out of his hold, limbs stronger than he expects, and falls to the ground.

Where once there were photographs, notebooks, diagrams, memories, there’s nothing but tangled and dirtied string. She starts to dig, fingers sinking into the wet earth. They come away bloody.

Arthur’s shut down his emotions, can’t do anything but watch and try to figure this out. He looks over at Eames, but Eames seems to be standing in a shadow somehow, his expression hidden from view.

“It was here,” Ariadne mumbles. “You weren’t suppose to see yet, but I found it. And… you weren’t ready!”

“Ready for what?”

She stops, goes unnaturally still for a long time. Arthur feels the air around them change again. A strange buzzing flickers along his skin, like the rise of electricity or energy, coming in small waves.

“I was working,” Ariadne finally says. “I saw something. Someone.” She looks up, right at Arthur. “You weren’t supposed to see him yet. But I followed him.”

“Followed? Who?"

She shakes her head, confused.

“I don’t know…” she fades off.

Eames steps forward. When Arthur glances in his direction he can see him clearly again.

“You’re in a dream, Ariadne,” Eames says.

Ariadne starts at Eames’s voice. She seems to jump, and Arthur thinks he sees her shrink away from him. But then the moment passes, and Eames reaches forward and holds out a hand. She doesn’t hesitate before taking his hand and he helps her stand. The strings fall away from her arms and puddle at her feet.

“A dream?” she says. She seems more confused now than scared, more present in her own body.

“For about two weeks,” Arthur says.

“Two…” her voice fades out. And Arthur can see her confusion lift and disappear. She looks herself now. “Two weeks?”

“Do you know where you are?” Arthur asks in an attempt to focus her further.

“I’m…” Ariadne looks around, down at her arms. Blood is pooling at her forearms where the strings were attached. “I’m in a dream.”

“And what happens when you die in a dream,” he prompts. He has to make sure she’s positive of the result, that if she does die down here she knows she’ll wake up, make it happen, instead of lingering here.

“You wake up.” And there. Arthur sees her as she was on the Fischer job. “Please tell me you have a gun. I don’t feel like waiting for the kick anymore.”

Arthur smiles. “I think we can figure something out,” he says. On the edge of his vision he can see Eames already pulling out a gun.

“Thank God,” Ariadne says, more breath than words. But as Eames takes aim Arthur has to try again. Just incase.

“Who did you see in the dream?” he says. “What wasn’t I supposed to see?”

Ariadne frowns, gaze locked on his except for a quick, barely there moment when her gaze flickers to Eames, turns blank.

“I can’t remember,” she says, and the sound of a bullet leaving a gun shatters the air.

When Ariadne dies her body turns to yarn, collapses, and Arthur is left standing in a mound of fabric, too stunned to move.

Eames lifts the gun to Arthur’s head; Arthur can feel the metal press against his skull.

“Ready?” Eames says.

And Arthur’s not. Not ready at all for any of this. He should stick around, try to pick up more details from Ariadne’s subconscious. But already the world is starting to fall apart around them, wet mounds of what looks to be flesh falling from the distant walls. And Ariadne’s words have confirmed, for him, that this is the work of someone, not a compound or a virus. Arthur just has to figure out who, or what, caused all of it.

“Yeah,” he says.

The shot goes off, but instead of waking up, Arthur sees Eames double over. Hands are fisted over his stomach. Blood is oozing from between his fingers.

“Shit!” Arthur lunges forward, can’t help it. Remembers the burn on his hand, the taste of blood in his mouth, praying suddenly that he’s the only one experiencing in real life what he experiences in dreams.

He holds onto Eames, sees a flash of a smile on his face.

“Knew you cared,” he grunts.

“Shut up.” Arthur tries to press harder to the wound to stop the blood flow that’s pooling in his palm, sliding sticky-hot between his fingers.

Eames laughs then, and it sounds odd, broken, like glass. Or thunder.

“Keep looking,” Eames says. “Just a little longer, darling.”

“What—” Arthur looks up, but stops. Eames’s face is clouded in a dark mist, shifting, and Arthur has a moment of sheer panic, grips Eames tighter.

And then it’s over. Eames is torn from his grasp as if he’s on an invisible string that pulls him straight back, over feet and yards, over a stonewall. Arthur hears him grunt, once, and then he’s gone.

Arthur’s alone. The world is red, feels like it’s closing in on him. He tries to slow his breathing, calm the shaking of his hands. He’s about to conjure a gun when someone calls his name. If he didn’t know any better he would think it was Eames. But Eames should be awake in reality right now.

The voice calls again, though, and Arthur turns in that direction. He takes an unconscious step forward, followed by another when he hears his voice called once more.

It only takes a moment to see what the sound is. There’s a figure in the distance, crouched low to the ground. Arthur quickens his pace, taking in the form of the figure, even though it’s crouching. It’s about the same size and shape as Eames. But as Arthur approaches, he can see that there’s more than one person. There’s a second body lying prone on the ground. The first is hunched over it. And as Arthur gets closer, he hears the sound of bone crushing together, the wet slide of something dragged across a stone floor, the ripping and tearing of something thick and wet.

Arthur’s heartbeat ratchets up. He swallows. There’s the smell of old meat in the air, made more foul by the damp, hot humidity. Arthur lifts his arm to cover his mouth and nose with the crook of his elbow, but it doesn’t help. The smell is pervasive, inundating everything in the dream with its rancid flavor.

The red light is dim, making it hard to see what lies twenty, thirty feet in front of him. There’s a definite feeling of wrong and danger. The air feels wet electric. But Arthur can’t help but move closer, curiosity a sharp, almost physical thing propelling him forward.

When he gets less than ten feet away from the figure, a loud, rending tear stops him in his tracks. Arthur gapes in horror as he sees the crouched figure pull something long and thick off the flank of the body lying on the ground. He thinks it’s clothes at first, but clothing doesn’t make that wet, thick tearing sound. Not even soaked in blood, not even in dreams.

Arthur watches the figure bring his hand to his mouth, its jaw move, and Arthur realizes the grating, bone-on-bone sound is the thing chewing.

Nausea is something he’d thought he’d grown out of on jobs. He’s seen a myriad of unsettling and sickening visions and scenarios in dreams. Seen them in real life, too. But as he looks away from the sight, Arthur brings a hand up to his mouth, tastes bile, only just manages to hold it back.

He must make some sort of sound, because the figure suddenly goes still. Preternaturally still. The grating sound of chewing goes on though, and Arthur can’t move.

The thing is looking at him. Its eyes are large, almost round, and Arthur sees a dark pupil before they glow fire-red. Arthur, a moment before, could have told anyone who asked what the figure’s form looked like, its shape and dimensions. But suddenly he can’t pinpoint anything. The figure seems humanoid but viscous, melting like a cloud.

There’s the sound of wind, the rushing of reeds against each other, and Arthur has the weirdest impression that the thing is breathing. Arthur spares a quick glance to the figure lying on the ground and feels shock go through him when recognizes the body. It’s a client that hired him and Eames a few months back. He’d double-crossed them, left them for dead. They’d escaped, though, and Eames had disappeared for a few days before finding Arthur again, reassuring him that their troubles were over. The man’s face is untouched, but his body from the chest down is torn, like he was being slowly, methodically skinned and carved.

The creature is standing now. It's definitely humanoid, but large. So large that even at a distance it seems to Arthur to be looming over him.  

When it starts walking forward, Arthur tries to move. Tries to take a single step back. But his body won’t respond. Trying to conjure a weapon out of thin air doesn’t work either. He’s stuck, trapped.

The creature moves with a strange fluidity. Almost like a cloud roiling in on itself while still maintaining a roughly human form. Darkness follows it, consumes everything it passes, everything behind it, and Arthur can’t breath.

But there’s a shift. As it gets closer, it feels as though it’s shrinking, becoming more compact. And the blurry, cloud-like edges are becoming more distinct again. The shoulders are widening, broadening, the hips taking on a loose cant with a sure, precise stride. By the time it stops in front of Arthur it’s Arthur’s own height and Arthur is looking into blue eyes.

“Arthur,” Eames purrs, and smiles, and Arthur feels the ground under him sway.

A hand is on the back of his neck, hot. And for a moment Arthur can almost fool himself into believing he’s woken up. Eames looks that real before him. Only he blinks, and there’s a tint of dark red on Eames’s lips, a sharpness in his smile. And Arthur makes a short, cut off keening sound as he tries to pull back.

But Eames’s hand keeps him captive, and the shushing sound that falls from his lips stills him, makes his muscles turn to liquid, and suddenly he’s so tired, so weary, and resting here, with this thing that Eames is, seems to be enough.

“Don’t,” Eames says. Arthur doesn’t know what he means. But Eames shakes him a little, wakes him up, and Arthur stands straighter.

There’s something in Eames’s other hand, and Arthur looks down their bodies at it, Eames is so close. Eames turns his hand up, as if presenting it to him for his viewing, opens his fist, and lets the flesh slip from his fingers. The sound it makes as it hits the ground is wet and soft.

“You look for the tiniest details,” Eames says. Arthur can barely hear him, but his voice seems too loud, as if it’s coming from everywhere. “And yet miss the most important ones.”

He lifts his hand, now free of its burden, and Arthur can’t even flinch back before Eames’s fingers skitter over his cheek, caress his jawbone, and Arthur would sigh, lean into the touch, but for the liquid left behind and the thumb that sweeps over his lips, presses slightly inside.

Arthur tastes copper and an earthy tang. He chokes, but Eames says something and the world changes. Images flash before his eyes. Arthur recognizes them as memories of the job he worked on with the client. But they’re from the client’s perspective. He sees the initial meeting they’d attended, the final meeting, and then the moment the client passed their information off to a third party and collected money. Arthur thinks the images will stop there, but he sees the fallout next. He sees Eames sauntering toward him, feels the gun Eames places against his head. But in lieu of pulling the trigger he flashes inhuman teeth at him in a grin. Then darkness rises up, a dark cloud covering his vision. A scream wells up in his lungs, turns from dry to wet and copper-filled. He feels his spine crack, feels claws catch on his skin and drag deep, rip into his throat.

Arthur comes to, breathing hard. His gaze is on Eames’s.

“Okay?” Eames says. And it’s almost a statement instead of a question. A demand. And Arthur doesn’t know what he’s supposed to understand. What this… thing, this creature in Eames’s form is supposed to be telling him.

Eames’s hand moves, squeezes slightly, and Arthur feels his fingers run comfortingly at the nape of his neck. He still tastes copper, but the memories that somehow belonged to the client are gone, don’t come back. Instead, he feels a sudden boost, a sudden uplift in his spirits, like energy is flowing into him, and he takes a long, shuddering breath in.

“Who are you?” he asks. His voice is barely a whisper.

“Oh, darling,” Eames says. And he smiles, sad, knowing, as though he’s just waiting for Arthur to catch on. “You already know.”

\--

The kick back to reality leaves Arthur feeling oddly calm. He doesn’t feel panic. Doesn’t know if he could. He still tastes blood in his mouth, but there’s an odd energy flowing through his veins, making his skin tingle, making him feel oddly more. Larger. He lifts a hand to his mouth, wipes the back of his hand over his lips. It comes away bloody, but Arthur does a check, holds still and runs his tongue over his gums, his cheek. The blood is not his own.

He hears a rustling in the bed to his right, turns his head, and sees Ariadne pulling out her IV.

“If I’d known you two were going to be walking into my dreams, I would’ve tried to make it a little more exciting,” she says. Her eyes are slightly wide, slightly stunned, but she seems settled, reassured by the room around her, by the feel of reality settling into her skin.

There’s a soft huff of amusement from Eames on Arthur’s other side. He doesn’t turn to look.

“I’d say that was quite exciting enough,” Eames says.

Arthur sits up, swings his feet to the ground, and unhooks himself from the PASIV.

“Welcome back,” he says. His voice is calm, dry, professional. He lets Ariadne place the line she’s pulled from her arm on the edge of her bed and waits until she turns to look at Eames before he reaches out and takes the line so she doesn’t see his hand shaking.

\--

Arthur has to wait a little bit more for answers. He feels like he might break apart in the meantime.

After they woke up, their contact had maneuvered them out of the room just before the team responding to Ariadne’s change of vital signs and sudden waking rushed in. Arthur and Eames are heading for the exit, about to leave the building, when Arthur stops. Eames sees it and jerks to a halt.

“I’ll meet up with you,” Arthur says. Eames opens his mouth to protest, but then Arthur presses the PASIV into his empty hand, puts a palm on his lower back, and pushes him toward the exit. “Give me a moment.”

Eames doesn’t protest, but Arthur can feel him turn and watch him retreat until he turns a corner and is out of sight.

It takes half an hour, but then Arthur is back in Ariadne’s room, watching as she tries to argue with a nurse that she’s fine, feeling normal, and would like to be released as soon as possible. Arthur means to question Ariadne quickly, efficiently, but he ends up sitting down on the chair beside her bed. He leans back, tries to get comfortable.

“You should give them a break,” he says when the nurses have deflected her questions and left, leaving them alone to talk. “They’re only doing their job. They did a good job keeping you healthy while you were checked out of reality.”

“You give people a break when you’re stuck in a hospital bed,” she says, but a small smile turns up one corner of her mouth. “Thank you,” she says. “For finding me down there.”

Arthur waves away her thanks. “Don’t mention it. Really.”

Ariadne frowns, glances sideways at Arthur before she says, “You probably saw a lot of messed up stuff down there.”

Arthur shrugs, tries to keep his heart rate down. He’s on the verge of answers. He can’t rush or spook her incase her terror in the dream comes back to the surface.  

“People’s subconscious is usually a little tricky,” he says. “We all know that.”

Ariadne gives a little laugh. Looks away. “I think I’ve had enough of mine for a while.”

Arthur nods. He watches Ariadne pick at the hospital blanket, debating. Ariadne clearly remembers the dream, the details of it. She turns her arms over and inspects her forearms, looking for wounds that should be there but aren’t. Arthur runs his thumb over the burn on his knuckle. The sensitive skin scrapes, and the pain pricks deep. He wonders at how different he and Ariadne are now.

He leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees. He needs answers. “But it was a mess down there. You’re lucky you’re awake and in your right mind.”

“Thanks for rubbing it in, how I could be a vegetable right now.”

Arthur shakes his head. “It’s a serious thing. What happened. Dreamshare can’t be taken lightly. Plus…” he pauses. “I need to know how you ended up down there.”

“I don’t know, Arthur.” Confusion clouds her gaze, pulls it in different directions. “I went to bed. Went to a pub before with some friends, then went home, went to bed, woke up down there looking for… something.” She doesn’t quite look up. “You know the rest.”

Arthur nods and runs a hand through his hair. He feels like he’s on the verge of discovering answers. Like Ariadne’s frantic energy in the dream as she was looking for something has seeped into his own skin, and what he’s looking for is just out of his reach. She knows something, remembers something, but isn't telling him.

“Miles said you went under a few weeks ago. With some colleagues.”

Ariadne nods. “Yeah.” Unrepentant. “They had some questions about architecture.”

“Architecture?”

“They said they couldn’t quite get the layout of a dream right. How to connect layouts. Maze-like.” She shrugs. “I kinda left out the Penrose stuff. Figured that was your thing."

Arthur smirks. “Thanks.”

Ariadne half smiles. “Yeah. Anyway. Showed them a few tricks. A few architectural designs. Went under with them a few times over three days.”

Arthur feels his skin tingle. “Who were they?”

“They said they knew you from a while back,” she says. “Introduced themselves as Hannya and Wukong.”

Arthur feels the blood rush from his face, sees Ariadne frown at his reaction. “I don’t know them,” he says. Which is a half-truth. He doesn’t know anyone by those names, but his research the other night in connection with demons, mythology, kitsune, pulled up similar names.

“They said they worked with you a few years ago,” Ariadne says. “Went through training with the PASIV Device with you.”

Arthur shakes his head. “No. You should’ve looked into their credentials. At least have run their names by me.

“You’re kind of hard to find,” she says. She looks annoyed. “I trusted their connection with you. Plus, I went with Miles’s recommendation last time he sent me to Cobb.”

“And look what happened there. Don’t do that again.”

“Yeah, thanks,” she says. “Lesson learned.”

Arthur manages to remain silent at that. If she says lesson learned, then he has to trust that. And hope she doesn’t end up in trouble again. But that’s in the back of his mind. All his attention is clamoring around the names she’s given him, the dream he’s woken up from.

A nurse passes by the door, and Ariadne starts, tries to flag her down, but she’s too late. She flops back against the pillows in frustration. 

“I need to get out of here.”

“Important plans?”

She hesitates a moment. “Classes are out until next week. I was thinking a vacation might be called for. Back home.”

Arthur raises an eyebrow. “A rest before the next delve into dreamshare? With a less colorful team?”

Arthur can see her think, watches as her lips pull into the smallest of frowns.

“Nah,” she finally says. “I think it’s time for a break.”

Arthur nods, doesn’t say a word. When the next nurse passes the doorway he calls out to her before Ariadne sees the woman, distracted by something on the floor. As Arthur leaves the nurse to handle Ariadne’s desire to leave, he nods at Ariadne, gives her a small smile.

“Good luck with the studies,” he says. “If you need anything—”

“I don’t think I will,” she says. And Arthur would leave it at that. Except he still has questions, ones he thinks he knows the answer to but needs confirmation.

“On our last job together,” he says, just vague enough that the nurse won’t understand what they’re talking about. “Eames said you found some information on Cobb.”

Ariadne freezes. Something very much like fear transforms her expression. She recovers after a moment though and looks up. “It was there for anyone to see if they wanted to. None of you did, though.”

“So there was something. And you found it.”

Ariadne shrugs. “I just saw it first.”

It’s enough of a confirmation for Arthur.

There’s one more question tugging at his mind. Every fiber in his being is screaming at him not to ask it, but he has to get to the bottom of this.

“One more question, Ariadne. Then you can harass the nurses into letting you leave. But you said you saw someone in the dream. Found something out. Something I couldn’t know.” He’s not trying for subtly now, doesn’t really care what the nurse might hear. Just wants answers. Confirmation. “What was it?”  

Ariadne looks away. Arthur sees her fingers starting to fiddle and tug at the edge of her blanket again.

“I thought I saw something once. But I couldn’t have.”

“Who, Ariadne?”  

Ariadne shakes her head. But her gaze darts to the door, does it again a moment later. Like she’s expecting someone to walk back through it.

“Does it have to do with Eames?”

Ariadne goes still. The nurse passes by her, asks her a question, and still she doesn’t move. Not until Arthur says her name softly. She looks up, stares at him, and Arthur knows.

He nods. “Okay,” he says softly. “I should go.” Then, to make sure, “Eames is waiting.”  

The change is subtle, just a small tightening of her grip on her blanket at Eames’s name. But Arthur feels as though she’s stood up and shouted loud enough for the entire hospital to hear. It’s answer enough.

“Goodbye, Ariadne.”

\--

Eames is waiting for him outside the hospital.

“Well?” he says.

Arthur looks him over, tastes copper in his mouth again. Feels the imprint of a hand on the back of his neck. He lifts a hand, rubs at his skin, can’t seem to shake the feeling.

“Well?” Arthur mirrors back. Uncertain what Eames, or even himself, is looking for anymore. It seems absurd to think that Eames has caused everything that's happened over the last few days. Mal's doppelgänger, Ariadne's coma, Yusuf and Saito's visions of supernatural creatures. It seems impossible. And yet he knows that Eames is somehow related to everything that’s happened. His dreams, his interaction with Eames in Ariadne's subconscious, and Ariadne's reaction to him all add up and point to something. Arthur just needs to figure out what that something is. Eames is a conman through and through, he's played with marks before, gone after enemies, and Arthur knows he has a sense of humor. He wonders how this all fits into it, and what it all means, that he's using people closest to Arthur. Especially if Arthur's perception of reality and dreams has started to warp. That, above all, demands answers. 

Eames watches him a moment. Arthur half expects him to step close, to put a hand on his shoulder and lead him to the car. Until he realizes Eames is waiting, watching him for some sign.

And Arthur feels something in him break. Go to pieces and leave a kind of blank acceptance in its wake. He takes a step forward, another, puts a hand between Eames’s shoulder blades as he starts them walking toward the car. Eames feels solid under his touch, warm. Arthur feels muscle shift under his palm as Eames swings his arms to walk. He feels the same as he always does. Arthur starts to wonder if he’s not going a little bit crazy.

“Did Ariadne say anything after I left?” Eames asks.

Arthur rubs his mouth. “Nothing new,” he says. He waits for Eames to react to that, wonders if his lie is obvious. But he can’t see any tell in Eames’s stance to warn him that Eames picked up on it. “Except that she’s taking a break. From dreamshare. Indefinitely.”

“So she’s done poking around in other peoples’ minds?”

Arthur nods. “She’s learned her lesson,” he says, heart thudding in his chest. “Just as you planned.”

“Like I planned?”

Arthur feels the air around them go warm. Thicker.

He nods. “She said she saw something. She figured something out, but couldn’t say what. It wasn’t about Cobb, though she admitted she figured out whatever he was hiding during the Fischer job, just like you said.”

Eames nods. “It was obvious. For someone who is so bent on the little details of things, seems to function on finding them, you seem pleasantly blind to the most important ones.”

“So you’ve said before.” They’ve arrived at the car and Arthur pulls them to a stop, faces Eames directly. “But I haven’t missed them this time,” he says.

“No?” Eames is calm, but his gaze is suddenly intense, expectant. Then, “No. You haven’t, have you.”

The sun comes out from behind a cloud just then, for the first time since they made it to Paris. It’s close to evening now, the sun sinking lower and lower. Arthur tells himself that’s what makes him see, for just a moment, Eames’s eyes tinge red. But the sun goes behind a cloud again, and Eames’s eyes retain the red iris.

Arthur feels like the ground is shifting, changing beneath his feet. He glances at Eames's mouth for signs of blood, looks to his hands. He’s clean. Arthur’s hand wanders into his pocket, but his die is the same as it ever is in the waking world. This is reality, and Eames’s eyes are still red.

“Alright there, Arthur?” Eames is watching him calmly, waiting.

“Tell me something,” he says abruptly. Fear gone. Eames is Eames in front of him. And yet, he’s not. Not really. Might not have ever been. “Have you ever worked with an extractor and architect team whose members used the names Hannya and Wukong?”

“I’ve heard of the names before,” Eames says. “Used them myself, on occasion. But they don’t have to be extractors. Don’t have to be architects.”

Arthur nods. “Ariadne said they were the people who took her down into dreamspace weeks ago. But I found them, the names. In a small article I found when I was trying to find answers to what Saito could've been talking about in regards to a kitsune. It's about shapeshifters, myths, tricksters.”

“That is what the names are usually associated with, yes. But the article probably got a few facts wrong.”

“Did it.”

“They always do.”

“And if I showed you the article, you could point out fact from fiction?”

Eames nods. “Even without it I could. But… the article is at my flat?” He looks expectantly at Arthur.

“Should I go back there?” It’s a challenge as much as a question.

“You can do whatever you want, Arthur. But... I owe you a tour,” Eames says. He looks almost anxious, like Arthur is about to turn and run. “If you’ll come.”

“And if I don’t?”

Eames shrugs. The motion is entirely normal, entirely Eames, so much so that Arthur feels an ache, sudden and overwhelming, in his chest.

“The choice is yours, Arthur. Always has been. You can come, or not.”

“And you’ll let me go if I choose not to?"

“I could never do anything but. Not with you.”

Arthur thinks he should leave, go while he still can. Put as much distance between Eames and himself as possible. But Eames is standing before him now, watching him and looking almost anxious for Arthur’s decision even as he seems sure and nonchalant as he rests against the car, hands in his pockets.

But Arthur makes risky decisions for a living. Has lived half his life in dreams by now. Feels the burn on his hand, tastes the phantom drops of blood in his mouth, still feels a foreign energy burning through his body. And needs to know the whole answer, all of it, to see where this will lead. Regardless of the consequences.

“I’m driving,” he says. And Eames hands over the keys, careful not to touch Arthur’s hand with his own. He gives Arthur all the distance, and silence, he needs as they make their way back to his flat.

\--

Back at Eames’s flat, it takes only a moment for Arthur to locate the article. He hands it over to Eames and makes sure Eames is reading it before he does a quick search on his laptop anyway for extractors that go by the name of Hannya and Wukong. It comes up negative for people, but search results pull up, time after time, the name of deities, demigods, myths.

“But you know all of this already, don’t you,” he says. He turns and looks at Eames, who is still reading the article. His expression is calm, patient. Arthur feels quite the opposite, like he’s about to step off a ledge and tumble headfirst into something he might not be prepared for, but needs to see anyway. The energy he gained from the strange transfer in Ariadne’s subconscious is still thrumming under his skin, but it’s steadied into a more subtle pulse, something that has him seeing sharper, yet feeling oddly settled in the anticipation running through him.

“Of course,” Eames says when he’s done reading. “But some of the information here is wrong.” 

“Is it?”

Eames nods. “I can tell you more about the names and who they apply to. If you wish.”

Arthur knows he can be dangerously reckless. He likes information, gathers it, hordes it. Loves making connections with it, uses it to give himself the greatest advantage and safety net that he can build. And yet he’s still a conman, still dipping into unknown subconscious space, peoples’ dreams. He still finds himself in the same room as Eames and remaining there, given the conclusion he’s come to.

But Eames has taken a step back from him after reading the article. He’s obviously keeping a respectful distance between them, not making sudden movements or making to touch Arthur. He’s watching and reading, much like he always has. Eames has never pushed him to a point Arthur can’t take, and Arthur sees that and trusts that now.

“And if I don’t wish?” he asks again, same as before.

Eames shrugs a shoulder. “Then it’s your call.”

And that does it for Arthur. Seals the deal. It’s precarious—Arthur is still wary—but there’s a safety net in place.

“I think I’m ready for the tour now,” he says. 

Eames has been waiting for Arthur’s decision, and yet he still looks shocked at Arthur’s words. Like he expected him to turn and run.

“Are you positive?”

Curiosity and wariness turn to frustration. “Eames. Show me. I didn’t come back here so you can talk in riddles and avoid the truth.” He can feel himself start to shake minutely. He’s so close to discovering the truth, needs to know it.

A smile, brief but brilliant, pulls at Eames’s mouth. “No. Of course you didn’t.”

Eames inclines his head to his right and starts walking to the dark hallway leading to the master bedroom. It’s the hallway Eames steered him clear of last night. He had said he needed to make it ready. Presentable. Arthur assumes it, or he, must be ready to be seen now. His pulse picks up, and he follows.

The hallway is still dark when they reach it, and Arthur feels a heavy weight settle over him. The same presence looming in the dark hallway that he’d felt last night lurks just out of sight again now. When Eames reaches out and flicks a light switch, Arthur squints against the sudden influx of light. But the light does nothing to dispel the expectant, breathless feeling overtaking him.

The hallway is not small like Arthur expected from the layout of the living room and the rest of the apartment. Rather, it looks like it’s been widened, rather extensively, and Arthur sees where some of the square footage from the living room went. Lining the hallway are rather expensive looking display shelves made of glass. And sitting on the shelves, on their own stands, are mask upon mask.

Eames starts walking down the hallway and Arthur follows him. He looks back and forth, gaze unerringly settling on empty eye sockets.

All the masks look worn in some way, as if they’ve been handled and used many times before. At the beginning of the hallway there’s a Grecian mask. If Arthur’s not mistaken, it’s Hermes. A trickster, as the myths tell it. It is, to Arthur’s surprise, made of clay, but pristine white. On first glance, Arthur thinks it might be a replica or something Eames pandered with in his free time. But when he looks closer, there are chips of clay broken off in the waves of the hair, a spot the size of Arthur’s pinky nail that’s flaked away from the mask’s lips. And there’s a smooth, worn quality to the masks’ chin, like a hand has gripped it many times before, worn it down smooth with handling despite the obvious care that’s been taken to preserve it.

“Man created the first masks about 9,000 years ago.” Eames’s voice almost startles Arthur, but he manages to hold back his reaction. “Or, that’s what scholars will tell you. It was really long before then. By people who saw a face beyond the light of their fires. A representation of something, a worshiping, a warding. Everything, all of the above. Scholars don’t know. But the wonderful thing about masks is that they can represent anything you wish them to.”

Arthur recognizes more of the masks the longer he looks. Most, to his surprise, he’s seen only in the last day, images that have popped up as results from his searches on kitsune and, only minutes before, Hannya and Wukong. Almost all of the masks are representations of tricksters and shapeshifters. There’s a Loki mask on one of the far shelves. A kitsune mask sits on a topmost shelf, just over Eames’s shoulder. Eames seems to lean in that direction, as if drawn to it. His gaze abruptly falls, lands on Arthur, and Arthur looks quickly away.

He takes a step to the right, further down the hall, and comes eye to eye-socket with the face of a young Japanese woman. Her cheeks are slightly round, her hair painted in an elegant part in black, her lips ruby red against the white clay.

“That’s Hannya,” Eames says. “From Japan. And next to her is her counterpart, the demon she transforms into.”

Arthur shifts to see the mask that’s displayed so close to the Japanese maiden, and pulls up short. It’s a black wooden mask. Horns emerge out of the creature’s head halfway down its temples. Its mouth is wide and unsmiling. Arthur feels frozen in place. He stares, tries to figure out if he feels threatened or saddened by the turn of the dark eye sockets of the thing. 

“Those are two of my favorites.” Eames’s voice is soft, spoken very close to him, and Arthur starts when Eames’s arm appears over his shoulder, hand gesturing between the maiden and the demon. Eames pauses at Arthur’s flinch, then drops his arm, and Arthur feels cool air rush over his back where Eames must have been standing quite close.

“Why?”

“The article gave some real facts…”

Arthur wracks his brain. “Japanese folklore. Noh theater.”

Eames grunts. “Sixteenth century. It was popular then, the young maiden. Transformed by jealousy into a demon.”

Arthur takes a step back and looks between the two masks. They’re tilted slightly toward each other, as if straining against some invisible binding to meet and form one mask.

“Is that where you got the urge to try your hand at forging?”

A soft laugh comes from Eames. “Not quite. The forging, you could say, came first. Or… maybe simultaneously.”

Arthur turns around to look at Eames. Frustration is still making him want to rush to answers, but Eames is starting to reveal things to him, giving hints of answers, and it’s calming Arthur’s need for information now, fast. It makes him slow down, look Eames over from head to toe, trying to read anything new from him. Eames is standing half in shadow now, between one shelf and the next. Half his face is hidden from view, and Arthur wants to tell him to step into the light, but can’t. Eames is watching him, and Arthur gets the distinct impression that he’s looking for some reaction from him, for some tell or warning.

Arthur wouldn’t be surprised to see him on the defense or, just the opposite, about to spring into an attack. Instead he looks calm, collected, and yet curious to see Arthur’s reaction. And, maybe, just slightly anxious.

It’s not an emotion Arthur expects. Not at all. And it makes him curious, makes him look Eames over again and ask, calmly, “And Wukong?”

Eames smiles. Something is happening behind him. The shadows thrown by the spotlights on the wall have shifted. Eames’s form is becoming slightly hazy, like the lights behind him are dimming, or the shadows growing. And yet the smile Eames gives him, faint but there, is one Arthur’s become intimately familiar with over their long and varied history.

“Chinese myth. Sun Wukong, actually. And a troublemaker, by all accounts. But a deity as well. He landed himself into quite a lot of trouble, but found himself free of it at the end.” His gaze travels around Arthur’s face. “He could shapeshift as well.”  

“The rest of the masks.” Arthur looks around, finds he still can’t name some of the faces he sees. “Are they all shapeshifters as well?”

“In some form, yes. Shapeshifters or tricksters. Masks that take the design you humans have assigned to some deity or being to represent what they’ve seen or heard about. They’re all an attempt to put form to something you wish to name, but can’t quite manage to.”

“ _You humans_?” And that’s at the heart of it. Arthur turns back to Eames and stares at him. Looks over the familiar face, the familiar form and body and muscle. While Arthur knows Eames, every inch of him, knows his work habits and sleep habits and has worked so closely with him for so long, Eames isn’t really human at all. Not if he's supposed to believe they are indeed awake right now. 

A small flicker of something passes through Eames’s eyes, some blankness that makes the hair stand on the back of Arthur’s neck. In that moment, Eames looks like he’s made of the same stone as some of the masks around him.

“Humans are odd things. They seek to put a shape to beings that have no shape to begin with. They create their own shapeshifters, their own deities, force them into an image humans can comprehend. They try to take control of something they have no claim over in the first place.”

“And yet you’ve collected all these images of deities. Born of human imagination.”

“I find the attempts… endearing. Interesting, in the least. And…” He pauses. “They can be useful.”

Arthur glances away, looks at the masks surrounding them.

“You’re a forger, collecting the masks of shapeshifters.”

Eames tries to smile. “You always said I was a little narcissistic. I guess you were right.”

Arthur huffs a soft breath, feels himself start to crack a little. “Only if you’re equating yourself with Hermes or the other deities,” he says, pushing Eames to give him more information, knowing he’ll rise to the bait. 

He turns around, expects Eames even now to smile, laugh a little bit.

But Eames doesn’t. His gaze is almost sad. “I came before them, Arthur. Before humans even had a name for what the shadows were beyond the light of their campfires.”

“You expect me to believe any of this?” It’s all so absurd. It has to be.

“What does your totem say?”

Arthur feels his totem sitting heavy in his pocket. He reaches down with his right hand, pulls it out. The acrylic is the same translucent red, the dots still painted white. He rolls it in his palm, shifts its weight around. It feels right. He crouches down, rolls it. Four. Rolls it again. Four. His hand shakes as he picks up his die and holds it. 

“Says it’s still reality,” he says, coming out of his crouch and standing to face Eames again. “But you knew it would.” Nervous energy is skidding across his skin, making him feel unsteady.

Eames shrugs. “Because it is reality. You can just see more of it now than you could before.”

“Can I?” He looks Eames over. Everything that’s happened, it’s all so fantastical, so… dreamlike. His totem says this is reality, and yet it feels like a dream. It has to be a dream. 

There’s only one irrefutable way to test if he’s in a dream. It never fails. If someone dies in a dream, they are kicked out and brought back to reality. There’s no alternative. And if Eames really is what he claims to be, a kick back to reality, or a bullet, won’t hurt him.

Arthur slides his totem back in his pocket. But as he pulls his hand out of his pocket, he continues the movement, slides his arm around and grips the Glock he has tucked in the holster beneath his waistcoat. Bile rises to the back of his throat, static burns in the back of his brain. He doesn’t hear the shot, doesn’t see it, but he feels the recoil jerk his hand back. His grip feels weak.

But his aim, as always, is true. Eames crumples to the ground, and Arthur watches as blood drains from Eames’s shattered skull. He feels the cut of gunpowder as he breathes in, feels it sink in deep, acidic in his throat, blending with the burn of bile.

Something dark and potent rises in Arthur, and he’s blind, rage building up until he’s full of it, feels like he might explode.

“You fucking liar.” His words come out calm, but they bite at his tongue and his throat burns. He lifts the gun to his own head, feels the hot muzzle of the gun bite into his temple. Something hot builds behind his eyes.

He doesn’t know what makes him look back at Eames’s body. He won’t see anything more than broken bone and blood and gray matter.

But when he does, the light in the hall catches on the blood gathering against the far wall. And as he watches, it moves, pulls back from the wall like it’s a living creature. Arthur’s frozen, feels a different kind of panic settle in.

Eames’s blood flows back toward his broken body, but suddenly shadows have gathered again, rise up from the floor and swirl around Eames. Arthur can barely see through them, but what he sees is Eames’s skin and bone coming back together, sealed with shadow.

Eames’s body jerks, once, then an arm shifts, a palm lies flat to the floor, pushes Eames up, up, and then Eames is standing, gaze on Arthur once again. He’s whole, alive, and Arthur watches the shadows retreat, spread against the wall behind Eames only to be sucked up into the empty eyes of the masks.

“Arthur,” Eames says, a warning. And Arthur realizes he still has his gun pressed to his head. Eames eyes it warily, looking between it and Arthur’s eyes as if he wants to reach out and pull it back. But he stays where he is.

Arthur’s hand falls, and his gun hangs limp from his fingers.

“If this were a dream, you would’ve been kicked out,” Arthur says. “You couldn’t be…” He feels numb. And yet his hand twitches as an overwhelming sense of relief washes over him, making him want to reach forward and touch and make sure Eames or whatever this creature is is indeed alive before him.

Eames nods. “But this isn’t a dream.”

“You expect me to believe totems still work, if you’re…” he doesn’t finish the sentence. Can’t.

“I won’t affect totems in reality, Arthur. Can’t. It’s a defense you’ve always had. Always will.”

Arthur re-holsters his gun and reaches into his pocket again, has to check.

Red acrylic, white paint. Four. Every time he rolls, he rolls a four.

“You did all this. Caused it,” he says.

“You can finally accept that?”

Arthur shouldn’t. Not in his wildest dream. And yet every sign, every roll of his die, every fact he’s come across is only serving as evidence to prove that what Eames says is true. Whatever’s been happening, Eames has caused it. And Eames is not human.

“I might have to. But that means you… The Fischer team. You chose them. You did this to _us_. Why?”

“Every once in a while people have to be taught some form of lesson. That’s what some tricksters do, you know. They trick, are the tricked, learn and teach lessons. Yusuf needed to learn there was more out there in the wide world than just science. Ariadne is curious. Pokes her nose in some business she shouldn’t. She is brilliant though. Saw me for who I really am. Even I’m not quite sure how she managed it. I had to stop her from telling my secret. Just for a bit. Just until…”

“Until what?”

“Until I could see if you’d accept it first.”

Arthur’s head feels like it’s spinning. “Mal… did you…”

“No.” He sounds sincere. “No, Cobb was responsible for Mal all by himself. I didn’t believe a human could create his own shade, not until I saw him create Mal and saw how she followed him, and then you, around before and throughout the Fischer job. He did that with no help from me. It’s surprising what guilt can do, even in its human capacity. I’ve never seen it done before. I just brought her back for him this time around.”

Arthur feels another wave of relief wash over him. It shocks him, that he could feel relief. That there’s some form of something _good_ in all this, and he can see it as such.

He looks Eames over, looks out of the hallway, into the living room. His empty wine glass from last night still rests on the table. He thinks back to then, the simplicity of leaning close into Eames, letting him push back and fit into all the spaces around Arthur. It felt right, good. And Arthur knows this should be bad. That the Eames looking at him now, inhuman as he is, should be evil in some definition of the word. But Arthur remembers last night, and this morning as Eames waited for him to give some sort of signal, permission, before he touched him. Arthur had taken comfort from him. He wonders if he still would now, or if he already has in his relief that Eames isn't dead, even if that means he's something other than human. He wonders if that makes _him_ something besides human, too.

“You’re lying,” he says. It’s a last ditch effort to give everything that’s happened a simpler conclusion.

But Eames, whatever Eames really is, looks unimpressed, gaze flickering around Arthur’s face.

“I don’t really have a need to,” he says. “Not now.”

And Arthur knows he’s right. There’s no reason why this thing that calls himself Eames would really lie to him. Not about this, to trick. He’s not human, not mortal. He has no need to lie. From what Arthur’s seen of him in his dreams and in Ariadne’s subconscious, if he really wanted something from Arthur, he would just do it. He has that power. There’s no real need for deception. Arthur would find himself in a dream, a coma, pursued by demons, or worse. There’s no reason for Eames to stand in front of him, revealing his secrets to him. Except that he wants to.

It’s that small fact that has Arthur lowering his guard, just a little, and lets him look upon Eames as he stands before him, take him in as he really is.

“What are you?”

“I don’t have a name. Don’t need one. You lot call me shapeshifter, trickster, Loki, kitsune, Hannya, Hermes. A myriad other names. I am all, and none.”

The lights in the hallway flicker, dim, and Arthur feels something settle into the air around him. He scrubs a hand over his face. Wonders why he’s not running in the opposite direction.  

When he looks up at Eames again, he sees Eames as he always has. But there are shadows swarming around his familiar figure, almost as if they’re living things. Or tails, parts of Eames sinking out of his skin to float freely around him. He recognizes Eames must be keeping this form, this image, because it’s familiar to Arthur. Won’t make him draw his gun and shoot or run. Despite everything, Eames is acting as he always has toward Arthur.

“Why?” is all Arthur can ask. “Why are you telling me this? Showing me…” he waves a hand at Eames’s form.

“I wasn’t lying when I said you were loyal. You saved my life once, back in Project Somnacin.”

“Would you even have died then? If that man had shot you, when you were stealing the PASIV.”

Eames shakes his head. “No. But no one, not ever, had tried to save me. When humans first started stepping into the realm of dreams with dreamshare technology, I was curious, even as I saw you lot taking over another realm that didn’t belong to you. Messengers used to travel by dreams. Now humans would take their place. Create their own messages.

“But I was curious. I wanted to see what you’d all do. No one surprised me with their greed and ambition. No one except you. You didn’t really know me. And yet you… befriended me. Then saved me.

“You’re loyal. I saw that loyalty in Project Somnacin. Was reminded of it again when you refused to follow Cobb down into madness, despite following him around the globe. I didn’t lie to you last night, with everything I told you. I called you again after inception because I’d seen you were still loyal, and somehow that loyalty extended to me. When I was reminded of that loyalty, when I saw it that first time when you thought you were saving my life, I was… you might define it as grateful. Or curious. Or… I enjoyed it, your company. That’s an odd sensation for me. I’m not designed to feel that. It’s not part of what I am.”

Curiosity is growing in Arthur, slowly overtaking all his other emotions. He tries to push it down, but fails.

“We were friends before… in Project Somnacin,” he says. “Was that real, or just a trap?”

“Oh Arthur. That was real. All of it. You saw that, didn’t you?”

And Arthur did. Has. In his dreams that weren’t dreams but memories. Eames’s memories. He’d felt Eames’s curiosity turn from something feral into something more concrete, more… human. Felt something form inside his chest like it was his own. An attachment had grown inside Eames, solidified. Turned into a strange form of affection that was entirely alien to him. An affection born where there was no room or possibility of affection before.

It’s fucked up. Messed up. Nothing like this is supposed to exist. But Eames is standing before him, masks hovering over his shoulders. The hallway is filling with shadow, and yet the masks are clear as if there are spotlights aimed at them alone. And looming larger than what his physical body allows, Eames stands amongst them all. The shadows seem to give him weight, form an outline of a true form that dwarfs the hallway and masks and should make Arthur cower back. Instead, he stands tall, strong, and feels invisible strands of fur and shadow brush against his arms, sink inside him, stroke against his very bones. He holds his ground, and feels oddly safe as Eames meets his gaze, holds it, and waits for him to speak. 

“You’re not going to kill me,” he finally says. The knowledge is unshakeable.

“I’d rather not, no,” Eames says. “I don’t necessarily want to kill anyone. I just do.”

“Because you feed on humans.”

Eames shakes his head. “I don’t need to feed on anything. But without it, without the flesh, the memories, the essence of a person, if you will, I start to fade out a bit. I can’t disappear, but I prefer being able to go where I want, when I want, with ease.”

“The man I killed on base. The client I saw in Ariadne’s dreams…”

Eames shrugs. “They were convenient sustenance, though not the most delectable, if you will. You deserved to see it and know the whole truth.”

“I still don’t understand,” Arthur says. “You’d keep me alive, risk telling me all this, because… I was loyal to you?” 

“I knew you’d be interesting if I killed you,” Eames admits. “Your memories. Energy. Whatever you want to call it. You’d be different than all the rest. Humans aren’t all the same caliber, but you would’ve been among the higher specimens. But then I talked to you, befriended you, and you seemed—and proved—more interesting alive than dead.”

And that, Arthur realizes with a jolt, is Eames. Eames as he knows him. Something is interesting, draws his curiosity, and he dwells on it. Keeps it. Arthur’s seen it over and over again. It’s something he recognizes in himself. While Arthur collects and hoards information, Eames collects and hoards what fascinates him. Arthur used to think he was something that fascinated Eames. That he’d wake up one morning and find Eames gone, having had his fill of Arthur. It hadn’t bothered him; it was something he could understand. But Eames had never left, never shown any sign of Arthur becoming something mundane, regular.

And yet Arthur has never felt trapped. Never felt like he was kept, possessed by Eames. The door has always been open for Arthur to walk through, leave if he so desired. But he never has. And he’s still standing here, now, in Eames’s apartment despite knowing what Eames is. Despite seeing and feeling what he is firsthand through Eames’s eyes. Eames has allowed him that, and is allowing him to walk away.

Any remaining traces of fear leak out of Arthur at that revelation. The details and bits of knowledge have all come together, clicked into place in his mind. Eames might not be human, but his regard and respect for Arthur is the same. And, if Arthur's truthful with himself, they aren't much different, in their mindset and curiosities. They're conmen, and while Arthur's entirely human, he's committed crimes, planted ideas in peoples' heads and stollen ideas from others. While what they steal and take might be different, they aren't all that different from what they were before Arthur knew what Eames is. And Arthur wants to know more. About Eames, what he is, what he can do, what that means for dreamshare. Arthur licks his lips before he takes a step toward Eames, eyes flickering around the masks before settling on Eames’s face again. He stares and waits, and Eames seems to get something. He breathes a sigh out, seems to let go a little more, and Arthur sees the blue of his irises disappear completely and turn red. And Arthur nods.

Eames was right, before. They’re conmen. Their morals are warped. And yet they have morals. At least, Arthur does. He doesn’t know if something like Eames can have morals, but he seems to have boundaries. At least where Arthur is concerned. Arthur’s always played hard and fast with life and limits. It’s going to have to suffice for now. He’ll figure out the rest as it comes. He has enough information now to do so.

“So what now?”

And Eames grins. And his teeth look sharp. They reflect the red light of his eyes before the redness fades to gray again. Just briefly.

“You’ve begun to dream again, Arthur.”

The dreams. They were memories he saw that weren’t his own. But not just that. Ariadne’s dreams weren’t memories, and yet he’d woken with similar results from them as from his dreams. With consequences—burns and blood—still in the waking world. The lines between dreams and reality have begun to blur.

“They were real,” he says. “My dreams.” He looks Eames over, and feels the same sensation he gets in dreams creeping up on him now, hovering just out of sight. It's as if dreams are starting to meld into reality, stretching forth. Arthur feels it, pulls it closer, and the sensation grows.  

Eames nods. “Ever since you arrived in Paris.”

Arthur looks down, at the burn shining pink against his knuckle. Eames’s hand jerks at the edge of Arthur’s vision, and he looks up before he looks to Eames’s hand. Doesn’t flinch when Eames reaches forward, swipes a soft touch over the mark. It doesn’t hurt, and when Eames takes his hand away, the burn is gone.

“There used to be dreamwalkers,” Eames says. “Beings who could travel between reality and dreams just as you would walk from one room into another. You’re fascinating, Arthur. Brilliant. You could resurrect the breed. Already have, if you wanted to.”

“You want to make me into something like you.” The idea is as thrilling as it is terrifying. And yet, Arthur can't resist. Not with so many possibilities open before him.

Eames steps a bit closer. Arthur doesn’t see the movement, just feels him hovering just a breath nearer. His body is unnaturally warm. Arthur almost leans into it, trembles for a second in an attempt to keep from doing so. And then gives in, feels his forehead brush something not quite solid where Eames’s shoulder should be. When he lifts his head again, he locks gazes with Eames.

“You can’t turn into me,” Eames says. “Nobody can. I was never mortal or human to begin with. But you can turn into something else.”

The masks seem to move behind Eames, and Arthur’s attention is drawn to them. They seem to grow in intensity, illuminated by something within. The spotlight over them has gone out, but Arthur can see them all perfectly clear, seemingly bobbing in midair, the shelves no longer there. Maybe not even there to begin with. Arthur feels the familiar weight of a dream settle over him, wonders if this is what it feels like when dreams and reality collide. The feeling of a dream around him is as familiar as reality for him, has been for years, and they settle over him, combined, as naturally as either state alone.

One mask in particular hovers, seems to grow in intensity. Arthur’s gaze is drawn to it, and he feels something in him fall forward, trip over itself as he sets eyes on the mask.

The mask looks like it’s made of clay, but it’s white. The surface is hand molded, oval. Two round eye sockets stare at him, the darkness behind them more complete than the shadows on the wall behind the mask should allow. There’s a single mouth, a straight, severe line. But as Arthur watches it, it seems to shift, soften, and the shadows around it seem to make it move.

Eames makes a soft sound next to him, and Arthur feels a brush of a hand against his hip.

“Good choice,” Arthur thinks he says. His gaze is still riveted to the mask. He wants to reach out, touch.

Eames extends an arm while Arthur feels frozen, rigid in place in anticipation. Shadows seem to follow Eames’s arm, curl around it. His hand closes securely around the base of the mask and he picks it up, pulls it close. He holds it up, presents it to Arthur. Arthur wishes he’d put it closer.

“It’s your choice,” Eames says. “Nothing can force it upon you.”

“If you did?”

“You’d be okay for a while. But you wouldn’t last.” His thumb swipes over the base of the mask. “But I wouldn’t force it.”

And Arthur believes him. Unshakably.

"I know," he says, and sees Eames grin.  

“All you have to do is put on the mask,” Eames says. And his voice is rumbling now, like thunder, like a growling creature in the vast darkness beyond the firelight. Arthur doesn’t see his lips move, but can hear the sound reverberating inside his skull. It seems to settle him more surely inside himself.

“If I do, I’ll have to eat like you?”

“You’ll have to eat. But I think you’ll come up with your own way to sustain yourself.” The shadows on his face make it look like he’s smiling. And Arthur has the brief, fleeting image of dreams consumed, of feeling stronger, _more_.

He looks back to the mask. Hears Eames repeat in his head, _It’s your choice. Choose_.

The hallway is dark around him, but Arthur lets something in him go, feels the darkness opening up, expanding. There’s a void around him, but suddenly he can feel a presence, very human, very still, in the apartment across the street. It’s an old man, worn down by years. He’s weary, dreaming of war, of weapons, and Arthur feels the shake of a bomb going off in the distance. He takes a breath in, feels the trembling in his lungs, feels something warm and strong stumble and unfold in his bones.

When Eames next touches him, it’s with another hand to his hip. And as his fingers curl around Arthur’s side, Arthur feels the touch deeper, like Arthur’s body is no longer really solid at all. Like he’s part of the shadows he now knows are Eames’s true form. Arthur recognizes he should be scared, angry, but instead he feels as if he’s more, larger, spreading out, just as large as Eames is.

And yet he can still feel with a human hand. The cool clay of the mask is hard against his fingertips, the mask almost weightless in his grasp. And as he lifts the mask up he sees the swirling darkness behind the eye sockets roll up to meet him, break into a thousand shards of light before reforming again into oblivion.

 


End file.
